Fairbanks-Morse: The Giant That Destroyed Itself
Did you know that they built an engine so revolutionary that the United States Navy trusted it to power their submarines through the most dangerous waters of World War II?
An engine with no cylinder heads, no valves, and two pistons firing against each other inside a single cylinder.
A design so unconventional that most engineers of that era said it could not work.
It worked, brilliantly.
Flawlessly underwater.
And that success, that extraordinary hard-earned war-proven success, is exactly what destroyed Fairbanks-Morse.
Because the moment the war ended, they took that submarine engine, bolted it into a locomotive, put it on American railroads, and watched 135 years of American industrial history begin to collapse in slow motion.
This is the story of a company that built something genuinely brilliant, yet they let that brilliance blind them to their own limitations, >> >> and they paid for that blindness with everything they had spent a century and a half building.
This is Fairbanks-Morse, the giant that destroyed itself.
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Let’s rewind.
The company was founded in 1823 as a manufacturer of weighing scales, not engines, not locomotives, scales.
Thaddeus Fairbanks, a mechanic and builder from Vermont, opened an ironworks and began making cast iron plows and heating stoves.
Then he invented a platform scale that changed the way America weighed everything, from grain and livestock to freight and commodities.
By the time of the Civil War, Fairbanks scales were the best known American product in the world.
But, Fairbanks-Morse was never content to be just one thing.
Through the latter half of the 1800s, the company expanded relentlessly into windmills, pumps, gas engines for farmers, and electric motors.
By the early 20th century, they had diversified into coffee grinders, radios, farm tractors, feed mills, and industrial supplies.
They were, as one historian put it, almost an industrial version of Sears-Roebuck, a company that seemed capable of making anything America needed.
And they kept growing.
By the early 20th century, they had established major facilities in Chicago and Beloit, Wisconsin, becoming a key supplier to railroads, navies, and industries across the country.
Then, in the 1930s, Fairbanks-Morse made the decision that would define everything that came after.
They began developing a diesel engine unlike anything else in existence.
In the early 1930s, Fairbanks-Morse adapted an opposed piston design similar in arrangement to the German Junkers Jumo 205, an aircraft diesel engine, configuring it for marine and industrial applications.
What they built from that work was the Model 38, an engine that threw away the conventional rulebook entirely.
No cylinder heads, no valves, two pistons per cylinder, one coming from the top and one from the bottom, meeting in the middle to compress the fuel charge between them.
It had two crankshafts, one at the top of the engine and one at the bottom, connected by a vertical drive.
It was a two-stroke opposed piston engine with combustion occurring between two opposed pistons within a single cylinder liner.
The result was an engine with fewer moving parts than conventional designs, exceptional power density, and a mechanical efficiency that impressed everyone who tested it.
The United States Navy took notice immediately.
When the Navy evaluated the Fairbanks Morse opposed piston engine in the late 1930s, they saw something that fit their submarines perfectly.
Compact and reliable, the engine was unlike anything the competition offered.
The engine was used extensively in US diesel-electric submarines of the 1940s and 1950s.
Through the darkest years of the Second World War, American submarines running Fairbanks Morse engines prowled the Pacific, hunting Japanese shipping, disrupting supply lines, and gathering intelligence.
The engine that powered them never let those crews down.
But there was something else happening beneath the surface of that success.
Something that nobody fully appreciated at the time.
Submarines gave the engines access to cool, sea-level air.
Locomotives had closed-loop cooling systems, while submarines drew cooling water directly from the sea.
The ocean itself was doing part of the engine’s cooling work.
The environment that made the opposed piston engine shine underwater included cool temperatures, consistent air pressure, and the ocean as a heat sink.
That environment existed nowhere else on Earth.
Fairbanks Morse did not know it yet, but they were about to find out the hard way.
Fairbanks Morse ranked 60th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.
By the end of the war, they were flush with confidence, flush with government money, and flush with a reputation built on one of the most demanding proving grounds imaginable.
They had built the engine that helped win the war.
Now they wanted to conquer America’s railroads.
The logic seemed unassailable.
If the opposed piston engine could power submarines through combat conditions, surely it could power locomotives across American soil.
While the company was ready to begin production of locomotive units in 1940, the War Production Board denied permission, >> >> citing the national interest of Fairbanks-Morse’s production of submarine engines and a locomotive market supplied by existing manufacturers.
In 1943, the WPB approved Fairbanks-Morse’s plans to sell locomotives, and it introduced the 1,000 horsepower switcher H10-44 in 1944.
The early results were encouraging.
Switching locomotives with lower stress, gentler duty cycles, and more forgiving environments performed adequately.
Fairbanks-Morse pushed further.
The Erie-built was the first streamlined cab-equipped dual-service diesel locomotive built by Fairbanks-Morse, introduced as direct competition to models from Alco and EMD.
These were mainline locomotives, road power, the kind of engines that would haul freight across the Rockies, through the desert Southwest, across the high plains in summer heat.
And that is exactly where everything started to fall apart.
The 38D 8 and 1/8 engine as configured for the Erie-built locomotives ran at a higher pressure rating than the Navy engines.
On western railroads like Union Pacific, the engines were operating under heavy loads at high altitude, high temperature, and low humidity, and often in the wake of waste heat from leading locomotives.
The ocean that had saved them at sea was gone, and without it, the engine’s fundamental design flaw revealed itself.
Because the exhaust port was located near the lower pistons, the engines suffered excessive lower piston temperatures, which led to piston failure.
And that failure could then cause cylinder liner damage and a possible crankcase explosion.
It was 7 to 8 years before a piston was developed that could stand up to railroad service.
7 to 8 years.
While their competitors, EMD, Alco, and Baldwin were out on the railroads building relationships and reputations, Fairbanks-Morse was fighting a piston problem that their own engine design had created.
And the maintenance nightmare made everything worse.
Replacement of a single power assembly required moving the locomotive under a crane and removing the locomotive’s roof hatch, upper crankcase, upper caps, upper connecting rod caps, and upper crankshaft, making the operation far more time and resource-intensive than a power assembly change on any other engine type.
Think about what that meant in practice.
A railroad shop foreman with 10 locomotives to turn around, and one of them is a Fairbanks-Morse.
The man in the shop was trained on EMD engines.
On large properties where EMD power predominated, repair of opposed piston engines that required extensive disassembly was often delayed in favor of other types that could be turned around more quickly.
It wasn’t just a mechanical problem.
It was a human problem.
The engine was too complicated for the environment it had been placed in, too demanding for the shops that were supposed to maintain it, too different from everything else on the property to get fair treatment when the pressure was on.
In 1953, Fairbanks-Morse introduced the 2,400 horsepower H-24-66 Train Master, which at the time was the most powerful locomotive available.
It also proved unpopular.
It was a locomotive was ahead of its time in power, but could not overcome the reputation its predecessors had already built.
By the mid-1950s, the damage was done.
The railroads that had given Fairbanks-Morse a chance were quietly switching back to EMD.
Several Erie builts were repowered with EMD 567 series diesel engines.
Railroads were not just rejecting new Fairbanks-Morse orders.
They were ripping the engines out of locomotives they already owned and replacing them with the competition.
With only marginal success with its diesel designs, persistent complaints that its engines were troublesome to maintain, and a market crowded with builders, Fairbanks-Morse decided to cut its losses and exit the locomotive market officially in 1959.
In total, it sold 1,460 diesel locomotives.
That number sounds significant until you compare it to the thousands EMD placed in the same period.
And then the real unraveling began.
The company was purchased by the Penn Texas conglomerate in 1958.
Fairbanks-Morse, the company Thaddeus Fairbanks had started from an ironworks in Vermont 135 years earlier, ceased to exist as an independent entity.
What followed was a slow corporate dismemberment that stretched across decades.
Name changes, restructurings, divisions sold off one by one.
Today, there are three separate corporate entities that could be considered successors to the company, none of which is a complete and direct descendant of the original.
Fairbanks Scales makes weighing equipment.
Fairbanks-Morse Defense makes marine engines.
Fairbanks Nijhuis makes pumps.
They are three fragments of what was once one of the most powerful industrial companies in America, each claiming the heritage, but none of them the real thing.
The name that once meant everything, that appeared on scales and windmills and submarine engines and locomotives across the entire industrialized world, split into pieces that do not even fully acknowledge each other.
Here is the brutal truth about Fairbanks Morse.
The opposed piston engine was not a bad engine.
As of 2024, Fairbanks Morse Defense Products power more than 80% of United States Navy ships with medium-speed engines.
The engine that helped destroy the company still serves the Navy today.
It was never the engine’s fault.
The fault was in the assumption.
The assumption was that an engine proven in one environment would automatically succeed in another.
That submarine success translated to locomotive success.
That what worked at sea level with ocean cooling would work at altitude in desert heat with inadequate shop support.
It didn’t.
And Fairbanks Morse, a company that had survived the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and a century of brutal American industrial competition, couldn’t survive the consequences of that one miscalculation.
The Model 38 opposed piston engine is still manufactured today.
The engine outlived the company that perfected it.
The Navy still relies on a design that the railroad industry rejected 60 years ago.
That’s the legacy of Fairbanks Morse.
Not failure, not incompetence, but the story of what happens when a brilliant company becomes so confident in what it has built that it stops asking whether it belongs where they are trying to put it.
One assumption, one market miscalculation, and a giant that had stood for 135 years quietly came apart at the seams.
