Morrison-Knudsen HO Scale Models

Morrison-Knudsen was founded in 1912 in Boise, Idaho, by Harry Morrison and Morris Knudsen, two men who had first crossed paths years earlier while working on irrigation construction in southwestern Idaho. Over the following decades the company grew into one of the most prominent civil engineering and construction firms in the United States, contributing to landmark projects such as Hoover Dam, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and the St. Lawrence Seaway locks. Though not originally a railroad company in the traditional sense, Morrison-Knudsen's deep involvement in infrastructure construction brought it into sustained contact with the railroad industry, and by the early 1970s the company had established a dedicated rail systems division that would eventually make it a significant force in locomotive and passenger car production and rebuilding. The company's rail operations began in earnest around 1972 with locomotive rebuilding work, including notable projects such as the reconstruction of Delaware and Hudson ALCO PA units and the rebuilding of Southern Pacific GE U25B locomotives fitted with Sulzer prime movers, designated the M-K TE70-4S and operated between 1978 and 1987. Morrison-Knudsen used the reporting mark MKIX in its capacity as a lessor of rail equipment. The rail division eventually evolved into the subsidiary MK Rail, which by the mid-1990s was producing new locomotives including the MK5000C and the F40PHM-2C. A parallel transit division rebuilt and manufactured passenger equipment for numerous agencies, including subway cars for New York City Transit, commuter cars for NJ Transit and SEPTA, and new cars for the Chicago Transit Authority and Metro-North, with assembly facilities operating at Hornell, New York, Chicago, and Pittsburg, California. Morrison-Knudsen's railroad and transit ventures ultimately contributed to the financial difficulties that brought the parent company to the brink of collapse in the mid-1990s. The transit division proved particularly costly, accounting for a substantial portion of the approximately 350 million dollars in losses the company recorded in the 1994 fiscal year. MK Rail was spun off and became a publicly traded company in 1994, and after Morrison-Knudsen declared bankruptcy in 1995 and was purchased by Washington Group International in 1996, MK Rail rebranded itself as MotivePower Industries. MotivePower subsequently merged with Westinghouse Air Brake Company in 1999 to form Wabtec, which continues to operate MotivePower as a wholly owned subsidiary engaged in locomotive production and overhaul. Morrison-Knudsen's broader legacy in North American railroading rests on its role as an innovative, if ultimately overextended, builder and lessor whose products served a wide range of freight and passenger operators during the final decades of the twentieth century.