Take a good look at the next freight train that has you stopped in traffic waiting for it to cross, because chances are the locomotive up front was built in Fort Worth.
"We got about a million square feet of space," said Mike Patton, general manager of the GE Manufacturing Solutions facility near Texas Motor Speedway.
About 600 people work at the massive plant, the largest of its kind GE has in the United States.
The Fort Worth facility is part of GE Transportation, which the company now plans to spin off, either through a sale or merger or it could become a stand-alone company.
"We start from raw sheet metal, and we cut it, we bend it, we weld it and assemble it and it makes one of these fine locomotives," said Patton.
Each locomotive weighs 400,000 pounds, or 200 tons, and takes just 21 days to build.
"I love trains," said Patton. "Growing up, I would ride my bike and go and look at trains all the time, so this is like a lifetime dream of being able to work and actually build them and see them in action."
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The newest locomotives are packed with 250 sophisticated sensors, which send a constant stream of information back to technical support teams.
"You imagine that there's millions of bits of data that this thing is transmitting back and forth and we're analyzing that data to be able to give our customers the optimal way in which to run those locomotives," said Patton.
A team of experts at GE's Global Performance Optimization Center near Alliance can track 17,000 locomotives in use all around the world.
"This center sees about two and a half-million messages from those locomotives a day," said Vic Russo, GE Transportation digital executive.
The tech support specialists spot problems early, allowing them to help field mechanics fix them quickly.
"We call them 'diesel doctors,' so they're always looking at the locomotive and seeing what needs to be repaired," said Russo.
The company has four GPOC locations, in Fort Worth, Erie, Penn., Brazil and Kazakhstan.
"They're able to take that locomotive off before it fails in a mission and then they can get material ready, locations ready, the right labor," said Russo. "For them it's all about turning that locomotive around really fast, effectively, with a high amount of reliability to get it back out on the rail hauling freight."
That same information helps GE improve the locomotives built in Fort Worth.
"We look at where we can make improvements whether it's through fuel efficiency, reliability, we're constantly taking that data and upgrading our systems," said Patton.
For many at the Fort Worth manufacturing plant, building locomotives is a childhood dream come true.
"Absolutely amazing," said Patton. "As a child I used to have a model railroad and playing with locomotives all the time and now actually to be able to ride on one, where we're testing it, and being able to see the guys putting it together, you know you talk about true craftsmanship that's exactly what you have here in Fort Worth."
In just more than five years, the Fort Worth facility has already delivered more than 1,400 locomotives.
