I was reading about the decline of ALCO in Schenectady. A pretty common sad story, new technology comes out and a business is slow and half heartily adopting as they can’t imagine a world where there old profit center doesn’t exist any more.

ALCO believed in steam locomotives, as they very profitable at one point, and while they adopted diesel electric locomotives eventually by outsourcing technology development to GE, they couldn’t be bothered to spend much money on developing a good diesel electric locomotive in house even though GM EMD and eventually GE developed their own superior models in their final 40 years that the corporation limped along.