EMD vs GE | Why Two Giants of American Railroading Build Locomotives So Differently !

[00:00:00]Growing up, my grandpa would pull the car over just to watch the freight trains roll by. And I never got why he loved those big engines so much. Turns out the two companies that built them have been at war for 90 years over something almost nobody notices. How the engine actually breathes. Two religions, one railroad. If you line up the big diesel locomotives running across America today, they almost all come from one of two builders. On one side, you have EMD, which stands for Electrootive, the company that basically invented the modern American diesel locomotive back when your great grandpa was alive. On the other side, you have GE. Yes, the same GE that made your grandma's refrigerator and the light bulbs in your hallway. These two have been slugging it out for decades. And the wild thing is they never agreed on the most basic question of all, which is how the engine inside should breathe.

[00:00:54]Here's the kicker. EMD spent most of its life building a two-stroke engine, and GE built a four- stroke engine.

[00:01:02]Sounds like nerdy trivia until you realize it shaped everything about how these machines run, how they sound, how they get fixed, and which company is winning today.

[00:01:11]It's like two pizza places in the same town where one swears by a wood oven, the other swears by a gas oven, and both are convinced the other guy is committing a crime against humanity.

[00:01:22]just to make the soap opera spicier.

[00:01:24]Neither company's really itself anymore.

[00:01:27]EMD got passed around like a holiday fruit cake. Started as a division of General Motors, the car people, and got sold off. And today it lives under a company called Progress Rail, which is owned by Caterpillar, the giant yellow bulldozer folks.

[00:01:44]GE Transportation, meanwhile, got swallowed in 2019 by a company called WABTE. So, the rivalry you're watching is basically Caterpillar versus Wabteg wearing the old jerseys of two legends.

[00:01:55]The engine that fires every single spin.

[00:01:58]Let me explain the heart of this whole fight, cuz it's genuinely cool once you get it. In a normal car engine, which is a four- stroke, each cylinder fires once every two turns of the engine. It pulls in air, squishes it, burns the fuel, then pushes the junk out. Four moves, two full spins, one boom. That's your Honda, your pickup truck, basically everything you've ever driven.

[00:02:22]EMD looked at that and said, "Yeah, no thanks." Their two-stroke diesel fires on every single spin. Power then breathe. Power then breathe. Twice the bangs for the same number of turns.

[00:02:35]First time you hear that out loud, you think it must be some kind of cheat code. And in a way, it is. The two-stroke can crank out more muscle for its [music] size because it's throwing a punch every time the crankshaft comes around instead of every other time. So, why doesn't everything use two strokes if they punch harder? Well, because there's a catch, and it's a big one.

[00:02:56]Normal engine sucks in its own air on the intake stroke. A two-stroke does not get that free breath. It fires so often it never has a quiet moment to inhale on its own. So, you have to force feed it air with a blower. Basically a fan jammed onto the engine that shoves air into the cylinders whether the engine likes it or not. No blower, no running.

[00:03:16]The engine literally can't idle without something stuffing air down its throat.

[00:03:20]The turbo that's also a supercharger.

[00:03:23]This is where EMD did something that still makes engineers grin. On a regular turbocharged engine, the turbo is spun by hot exhaust gas blasting out the cylinders. Problem is, at low speed, there's barely any exhaust. So, the turbo just kind of sits there being useless until you rev it up. For a two-stroke that needs air at all times, a lazy turbo at low speed is a death sentence. EMD's answer was a turbocharger with clutch and gears built into it. At low speed, it's mechanically driven by the engine itself, so it acts like a supercharger and force feeds the cylinders no matter what. Then, as the engine winds up and the exhaust really starts howling, the gas takes over, the clutch lets go, and it freewheels like a normal turbo. One device doing two completely different jobs, depending on how hard the locomotives working. It's the engine equivalent of a guy who pedals his electric bike until the battery kicks in.

[00:04:18]That single trick is a huge reason EMD locomotives are famous for slamming out full power the instant you open the throttle. Old railroad engineers will tell you that EMD just goes while a GE takes a breath and builds up to it. Drag racers would call the EMD the one with no turbo lag and they would be right.

[00:04:35]The engine names are a secret code.

[00:04:38]Quick thing that makes EMD nerds way too happy. Those engine names. The 567, the 645, the 710 are not random model numbers. Each one's the exact size of a single cylinder measured in cubic inches. The 710 packs 710 cubic in into every cylinder, and a big road engine carries 16 of them.

[00:05:00]>> Do the math and you get over 11,000 cubic in of engine. For comparison, the V8 in a fat American muscle car is around 300 cubic in total. One single EMD cylinder is more than twice that whole car's engine.

[00:05:14]EMD kept the exact same outside dimensions across all three for decades and just quietly grew the [music] guts inside to make more power. It's why a mechanic who learned the 567 in the 1950s could walk up to a 710 40 years later and still know where every bolt lived. Cheap to train people, cheap to stock parts, and a huge reason these engines refused to die. And here's the feature railroads were obsessed with the power assembly. Each cylinder is basically a self-contained cartridge, piston liner, and head in one chunk.

[00:05:47]When one wears out, you don't gut the whole engine. You yank that one cartridge and drop a fresh one in, sometimes overnight. These pistons routinely run 400,000 m and at least one EMD piston crossed a full million miles before it quit. Your car engine faints at 200,000 and you throw the whole thing away.

[00:06:06]>> GE played it safe and it worked. G went the other direction entirely. Their locomotive engine, the famous FDL and later the JVO, is a four- stroke. the same basic breathing pattern as your car, just scaled up to the size of a studio apartment.

[00:06:21]Each cylinder takes its turn, inhales on its own, and fires every other spin. It has real intake valves and real exhaust valves. The full setup, more moving parts up top than the EMD design. The trade-off is the opposite of EMDs. The GE4 stroke doesn't punch quite as hard per pound of metal, but it tends to sip fuel a little more cleanly, and it doesn't need that constant force feeding just to stay alive. It breathes like a regular engine, so it behaves more predictably when the rules get strict, which is going to matter a whole lot later in this story.

[00:06:55]For decades, the joke among rail workers was that an EMD was an oil leak with an engine built around it, while a GE was the reliable nerd who never quite got invited to the cool parties.

[00:07:05]Both jokes had some truth. EMD two-strokes do love to weep a little oil. It's just two-stroke life. And GE spent years being the underdog nobody respected.

[00:07:16]Funny how that turned out. A diesel train is secretly electric. Here's something that quietly breaks people's brains. That giant diesel engine we keep talking about doesn't actually turn the wheels. Not even a little. It'd be impossible to build a gearbox tough enough to bolt a 4,000 horsepower engine straight to steel wheels dragging 10,000 tons. Clutch would turn to vapor on the very first pull.

[00:07:41]So, both EMD and GE cheat the same clever way. The diesel does only one job. Spins a giant generator and makes electricity.

[00:07:51]That electricity feeds traction motors bolted right onto the axles. And those motors are what actually turn the wheels.

[00:07:57]Every freight locomotive in America is really an electric vehicle that happens to haul its own power plant around with it. Your neighbor's Tesla and a mileong coal train run on the same basic idea, just separated by about 200 tons.

[00:08:11]This setup hides a slick bonus called dynamic braking. Heading down a steep mountain grade, the crew flips those traction motors into generator mode. Now the wheels have to fight to spin them, which drags the whole train down without ever touching a brake pad. and the leftover energy blasts out of the roof as heat through big fans. It's the exact trick your hybrid [music] uses to recharge while slowing down, except scaled up to hold back something longer and heavier than a skyscraper laid on its side. Both builders lean on this, and getting it right is a quiet part of why railroads pick one over the other.

[00:08:43]EMD ran the whole country. Rewind to the middle of the last century, and there was no rivalry because EMD was simply crushing everyone. After the Second World War, American railroads were dumping their steam engines as fast as they could. Yet EMD had the diesel locomotive that just worked, was reliable, simple to maintain, and backed by the muscle of General Motors. If you ran a railroad, you bought EMD. End of discussion.

[00:09:09]By 1968, EMD had something like 70% of the market. GE had clawed its way to about 22%, mostly by knocking off the old Alco company that used to be the number two player.

[00:09:21]Between 1968 and 1980, EMD was cranking out around 992 locomotives a year on average, while GE managed about 281.

[00:09:30]That's not a rivalry. That's a varsity team scrimmaging the middle school.

[00:09:35]DMD was Coca-Cola, and GE was the store brand soda your mom bought when money was tight. GE fired its first real shot back in the early 1960s with a locomotive nicknamed the Ubot, Bronny machine that railroads actually tested and praised. It had a sealed body that kept dust out of the engine. It made more horsepower than what EMD was offering. And for the first time, the railroads went, "Hm, maybe there is another option here." EMD didn't panic.

[00:10:02]They fired back with a model called the GP30. Leaned on their reputation for being rock solid, reminded every railroad mechanic in America that they already knew EMD machines inside and out. It worked. The GP30 outs sold the Yubot almost 2 to1 and they kept EMD on the throne for another 20 years. [music] But GE had drawn blood and they never forgot the taste. GE knew it was the underdog and underdogs either quit or they get sneaky.

[00:10:29]GE got sneaky. They poured money into making their locomotives easier to access, easier to maintain, and packed with newer electronics. They sealed the engine compartment to keep dust out, made everything reachable for the mechanics, and started offering railroads sweet deals on financing and maintenance. They weren't just selling an engine, they were selling a relationship, like the cable company that throws in three free months to lock you in. The fumble that flipped the game. Then EMD tripped over its own feet. In the early 1980s, EMD pushed out a model called the SD50, trying to squeeze more horsepower out of the design. They didn't go well. The engine suffered breakdowns, cracked crankshafts, the kind of failures that make a railroad's accountant cry into his coffee. Picture a brand new locomotive dragged into a shop, hood torn open, guts exposed, three mechanics elbow deep in it instead of out earning money on the mainline. Every hour it sits there dead, the railroad is bleeding cash.

[00:11:30]G saw the blood in the water and went straight for it. Their lineup at the time was more modern, came with better deals, and crucially, it didn't embarrass railroads by breaking down.

[00:11:40]Orders started swinging hard toward GE, and in 1987, the first time in history of American railroading, GE passed EMD for the number one spot.

[00:11:51]Store brand had become the main brand.

[00:11:53]EMD never got that crown back. Through the 1990s, GE just kept piling it on with models that sold by the thousands.

[00:12:00]The student had become the master. Then the master had become the legend. Then the legend bought the whole school.

[00:12:08]By the time the dust settled, GE was sitting on roughly 70% of the North American locomotive market. The exact number EMD used to own, and EMD was stuck around 30%.

[00:12:19]The whole thing flipped almost perfectly like watching a seesaw in slow motion.

[00:12:24]The quiet revolution in the 1990s.

[00:12:27]While EMD and GE were busy fighting over engines, a second war broke out down at the wheels, and it changed everything.

[00:12:35]For most of history, those traction motors ran on DC, direct current, the simple old kind. They worked, but lug them too hard at low speed, and they would literally cook themselves. So, a heavy train clawing up a grade could fry its own motors and die on the hill.

[00:12:51]In 1993, EMD rolled out the SD70 Mac, the first big American freight locomotive built around AC traction motors instead. AC motors are tougher.

[00:13:01]They shrug off slow, heavy lugging that would kill a DC motor, and they grip the rail with far more control. Burlington Northern bought them by the hundreds to drag enormous coal trains and found that three of the new AC units could do the work of five old DC ones. Fewer locomotives moving the same coal is a kind of math that makes a railroad bean counter weep with joy.

[00:13:22]The catch was the price tag. You see motors need pricey inverters to chop the electricity into the right shape. So the locomotives cost noticeably more upfront.

[00:13:32]GE jumped in fast with its own AC machine, the AC 4400 CW, whose name was literally its horsepower and promptly outsold EMD's version by a wide margin.

[00:13:43]piling on even more proof of who owned the market now.

[00:13:47]Today, AC traction is standard on basically every heavy six axle freight unit in the country. Complete flip from 30 years ago. The 6,000 horsepower flop.

[00:13:58]Then both companies got greedy at the same moment and both face planted in the same mud. In the late 1990s, the shiny dream was a single locomotive making 6,000 horsepower so one unit could swallow the job of two.

[00:14:12]EMD built the SD90 MAC around a brand new engine called the 265H.

[00:14:18]GE fired back with the AC 6000CW and a giant German designed engine of its own.

[00:14:24]Both were duds.

[00:14:26]G's new engine block had ugly vibration problems and rattled other parts to death. EMD's H engine was so cranky that the company shipped many of its big locomotives with the old 710 crammed in instead. basically selling a 6,000 horsepower body with a 4,000 horsepower heart and hoping nobody pee. Customers pee.

[00:14:46]The whole fantasy fell apart for a deeply boring reason. If one monster locomotive dies, you lose all 6,000 horsepower at once and your train is stranded out on the line. Two normal units almost never quit at the same second. So, railroads quietly backed away and returned to the trusty 4400 horsepower size.

[00:15:06]Union Pacific dowed its big AMDs down to act like regular locomotives, and CSX tore the failed engines out of its GE giants and dropped in dependable JVO motors instead.

[00:15:17]The lesson both legends relearned the hard way. Bigger is not automatically better. Sometimes bigger is just a more expensive way to break down. Power versus patience. So, which design's actually better? This is where rail fans start fist fights at model train shows.

[00:15:33]So, let me lay it out fair.

[00:15:35]The EMD two-stroke gives you serious power for its weight and that instant throttle response. Fans love how an EMD lugs down and pulls hard, [music] grinding up a grade like a stubborn mule that refuses to lose.

[00:15:48]There are EMD locomotives that are 40, 50, even 60 years old and still showing up to work every day, which is an absolutely insane lifespan for a machine that gets beaten like that.

[00:16:01]The GE four-stroke counters with fuel efficiency and the kind of steady reliability that bean counters adore.

[00:16:07]The railroad doesn't care about looking cool at a grade crossing. It cares about the total cost of owning the thing over decades. The fuel burned, the hours in the shop, the parts replaced. G built its empire by winning that boring math problem over and over. Boring math is exactly what runs a railroad.

[00:16:26]Romance loses to spreadsheets every time. There's also the simple matter of feel. Walk up to both with the engines running and they sound different. The EMD two-stroke has that fast, busy, almost angry rhythm because it's firing twice as often. The GE has a deeper, lopier beat.

[00:16:45]Train nerds can tell which builder is coming from a half mile away with their eyes closed. And honestly, that's a flex I respect even if I will never have it.

[00:16:53]The rule that broke the two-stroke.

[00:16:56]Now for the plot twist that nearly ended the whole EMD two-stroke story. On January 1st, 2015, brand new pollution rules called Tier 4 kicked in for new locomotives in the United States. These rules slash the allowed soot and smog by enormous amounts. Suddenly, every new engine had to run dramatically cleaner or it couldn't legally be built for use in the country. Here's the cruel joke of physics. That same two-stroke design that punches so hard, the one that fires every spin and force feeds itself air is genuinely hard to make clean. The way it breathes and scavenges air makes the emissions math a nightmare.

[00:17:35]EMD swore for a while they could tune up their beloved 710 two-strokes engine to pass tier 4. They tried. They tried hard and they failed. The engine that built the company couldn't be made clean enough to survive the new rules. GE, on the other hand, with its calmer four- stroke breathing, was ready. Their new JVO engine, a 12cylinder that made the same power as the older 16cylinder while burning less fuel, cleared tier 4 and was rolling off the line in 2015, right on time. GE did it without even needing the URA fluid that diesel pickups squirt to clean their exhaust, which railroads love because it meant one less thing to refill. EMD had to betray its own identity. So, what did EMD do? The thing that must have stung like crazy. They abandoned the two-stroke for their new flagship and built a four-stroke engine, the 1010. Basically the same [music] kind of breathing G he'd been using all along.

[00:18:30]The company whose entire identity was the two-stroke had to become what its rival always was just to stay in the game. That's like Coke quietly switching to the Pepsi recipe and hoping nobody notices.

[00:18:42]And they were late. GE was selling clean tier 4 locomotives in 2015, while EMD's four-stroke replacement didn't really show up ready for prime time until around 2017.

[00:18:53]Even then, it stumbled out of the gate with reliability complaints.

[00:18:57]In a market where a locomotive costs millions and railroad orders are in bulk, being 2 years late with a shaky product is catastrophic.

[00:19:05]By some accounts, nearly all the tier 4 locomotive sales in that stretch went to GE.

[00:19:10]EMD basically watched the whole feast happen from outside the window.

[00:19:15]It's a brutal lesson. The exact feature that made EMD legendary for half a century. That hard-hitting two-stroke became the anchor that nearly sank at it the moment the rules changed.

[00:19:26]The thing you're best at can become the thing that kills you when the world moves. Somewhere a business professor is nodding so hard his glasses fell off.

[00:19:35]What these beasts actually cost.

[00:19:38]All right, so let's talk money because the numbers are bonkers. A brand new mainline freight locomotive runs somewhere between three and $5 million depending on how it's equipped. Union Pacific, one of the giant railroads, has flat out confirmed that each of its locomotives costs about $3 million a pop. That's for one engine. A single freight train might have three, four, five of these up front. So you're looking at a parade of money rolling down the tracks.

[00:20:05]These things weigh around 200 tons and are built to last 40 to 50 years, sometimes even longer. Compare that to your car, which loses half its value the second you drive it off the lot and is basically a paper weight at 15 years old.

[00:20:18]Locomotive is more like a house. A huge upfront price, but designed to earn its keep for generations.

[00:20:25]>> Exactly why railroads are obsessed with reliability and fuel economy. When you're spending 3 million bucks and planning to run it for half a century, you don't buy the one that looks cool.

[00:20:35]You buy the one that costs the least to feed and fix. This is why so many railroads now rebuild old locomotives instead of buying new ones. A modernized rebuild might run $1.5 to $2 million, a serious discount off a new unit. And it gives a 40-year-old frame a fresh second life. Those rough old EMD workh horses are the favorites for this. the SD40 family especially, which railroaders treat like the Toyota pickup that simply refuses to die. It'd probably bury one it would crawl back out and ask for a train to pull. The fight never really ended. Today, the battle has moved to weird new ground because GE so thoroughly dominated the clean tier 4 market at home. Both companies now make a ton of locomotives for export, selling to railroads in other countries where the rules are different. The profit can be better. The home turf war has now been turned into a global one and the bad blood is still flowing. In >> 2023, Progress Rail, the EMD side, actually sued WebTech, the GE side, claiming WebTech had grabbed too much power over the locomotive business and was squeezing the competition.

[00:21:43]The two of them traded legal punches for a couple of years before finally reaching a settlement in early 2026 with nobody admitting they did anything wrong, which is corporate speak for let's stop paying lawyers. After 90 years, these two still can't be in the same room without it turning into a brawl.

[00:22:01]Step back and the whole saga is honestly beautiful. Two American giants looked at the same job, hauling unthinkable weight across a continent and came up with two completely different machines to do it.

[00:22:12]One bet on raw punch and lived by it for 50 years. The other bet on patience and efficiency and slowly took the throne.

[00:22:20]And the moment the world demanded clean air, the patient one won the war while the puncher had to rewrite who it was.

[00:22:26]So next time you're stuck at that crossing counting cars, look at the engine up front. There's a 90-year argument rumbling right past your bumper and now you actually know what they're fighting about.

[00:22:39]>> So the next time somebody tells you a train is just a train, you have my permission to be insufferable about it.

[00:22:46]Two strokes, four strokes, blowers that double as turbos, a fumble in the 80s, and a pollution rule that flipped a legend on its head. Same job, two answers, one very long grudge that is still rolling down the rails today.