What Happened To Plymouth Locomotive? - Trains Magazine

JoeBlow

Plymouth was a major builder of small locomotives for a long time and then it disapeared after it was aquired by Ohio Locomotive Crane. What happened? Did Ohio Locomotive mismanage Plymouth after they aquired it? Was Plymouth already in an irreversable decline before it was aquired? With other mom and pop operations, such as brookeville, why no Plymouth?

No idea.  One thing is that Plymouth's heyday was when loaded freight cars were in the 50-60 ton gross weight.  With today's freight cars favoring the gross weight at the 286K, it doesn't take many cars to be way beyond the ability of any thing Plymouth built to be able to hanle.  Secondly, as time passed, 1st Generation diesels, both switchers and road units became plentiful and cheap on the second hand locomotive market and they had abilities far in excess of what Plymouth was building.