Tracking on Three Continents

Progress Rail Services and Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD) are committed to increasing capacity to produce locomotives globally. Rising oil costs in recent years have made railroads a more efficient transportation alternative than trucking for long hauls.

Since acquiring EMD in 2010, Caterpillar and Progress Rail have made significant investments in new equipment and plant improvements to enable the creation of new products and services to meet the growing demands of the international railway industry. With new locations located strategically around the world, Caterpillar is well-positioned to meet the challenging competitive realities of the global rail industry and to provide quality products to customers around the world.

The Muncie, Ind., facility is the first locomotive assembly plant to open in the U.S. in many years and marks Progress Rail's strategic approach to compete and win in the global railway industry. In less than two years, this facility has completed 100 diesel-electric locomotives for customers.

In South America, Progress Rail, through its subsidiary, MGE Equipamentos e Servicos Ferroviarios Ltda. (MGE), has located a locomotive manufacturing facility in Sete Lagoas, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, to better serve the diesel-electric locomotive market in this region. The company made an investment to open and modernize the existing manufacturing plant to produce world-class locomotives. This state-of-the-art facility, which has the potential to create jobs, assembles and manufactures EMD-branded locomotives in a 12,000-square-meter space on a 100,000-square-meter site.

Since 2006, Caterpillar has demonstrated its rail commitment by investing more than $2 billion to meet customers' growing needs. Through these collective investments, Progress Rail and EMD are positioned to produce the most durable, reliable and sustainable locomotives in the world.