It's been a disastrous year for the locomotive business, but GE Transportation Chief Executive Lorenzo Simonelli said 2010 could be even worse.Simonelli, who predicted early this year that locomotive production would fall 44 percent in 2009, sees even tougher times ahead and the possibility of more permanent layoffs at Erie County's largest employer. He said locomotive production could fall another 50 percent from this year's level as the company works to fill a backlog of previous orders, a Wall Street Journal blogger reported Wednesday. At that rate, the work force that built 861 locomotives in 2008 at the Lawrence Park Township factory would be on track to build about 240 in 2010.
Stephan Koller, an Erie-based spokesman for the company, a division of General Electric Co., confirmed the gist of Simonelli's remarks.
"It's not looking good," Koller said. "We are eating away at our backlog, and so it's a shrinking backlog."
The company, Koller has said several times, hasn't received a single order from a North American rail customer this year.
While foreign plants are gearing up to build locomotives from kits built in Erie and at GE's Grove City engine plant, a recent order from Indonesia for 20 locomotives stands as one of the few bright spots for about 4,000 local employees. That order helps, Koller said. But at a plant that typically builds 800 to 900 locomotives a year, it helps only so much.
A below-par 2009 reflects what company officials were expecting when they announced 350 permanent job cuts in February and placed another 1,200 workers on temporary, lack-of-work layoffs.