Description
Wabtec is an American company formed by the merger of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company (WABCO) and MotivePower Industries Corporation in 1999. It is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Wabtec manufactures products for locomotives, freight cars and passenger transit vehicles, and builds new locomotives up to 6,000 horsepower (4 MW).
The company merged with GE Transportation on February 25, 2019.
History
The company's origins go back to 1869 with the foundation of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. That company (also known as WA&B later as WABCO) became independent in 1990 via a management buy-out, and went public in 1995. Another company, WABCO Vehicle Control Systems, also created from the Westinghouse Brake Company, is independent of Wabtec and was spun off by American Standard Companies (the ultimate owner) in 2007.
The other company forming Wabtec, MotivePower Industries, can be traced back to 1972, with the formation of the MK Rail division by the Morrison Knudsen group and the purchase of a manufacturing facility in Boise. In 1994 Morrison Knudsen created a subsidiary MK Rail Corporation; during the first half of the same decade the MK Rail group expanded with the acquisition of various other locomotive component companies. In 1996, MK Rail group separated from the parent Morrison Knudsen and adopted the name MotivePower Industries Corporation. In the later half of the 1990s further companies were acquired – again all in the locomotive components business. MotivePower, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wabtec, continues to manufacture locomotives.
The corporate logo is supposed to represent an axial view of a mechanical brake valve, where different air ports line up between the 'stator' and 'rotor' depending upon the handle position.
