LRC/Talgo owned most of the shops there until 2006? when MRL bought the whole property. MRL uses most of the big main building for repairs and storage, MoW also uses part of the building too. The old car shop is used for locomotive storage, they keep quite a few of the old geeps in there. Most of the other buildings besides the big main one and car shop are all vacant. After more than half of the mechanical forces were furloughed over the last 2 years, Livingston has been a rather quiet place in the roundhouse. Rail traffic on MRL is through the roof right now and some of those guys have been brought back and engines pulled from storage, but it's still a far cry from what it was.
Our club did a tour a couple of years ago........here's a link to some of the pics. http://www.mtntrak.org/Event Pages/2008/Nov 1 2008 MRL Shop Tour.htm
It has had a long twisted history. Dennis Washington bought the backshops along with the MRL and set up LRC as a seperate business entity. In 1991 he brought in a competent manager from M-K and began to expand the business of LRC, which brought it out of the red and expanded it's employment base. It was at this time I also transferred there from M-K as an Electrician. About 1994 he sold it to his bro-in-law, Randy Petersen, who continued the expansion for a bit, including the advent of the short-lived LRCX program lease units. I left at the end of 1996 and it seems that it was in 1999? he sold out to Talgo after running out of work and poor performance of the lease division. And as a second shot, the railroads started in buying new units instead of refurbishing old ones, the modern SF management mentality, which cuts out the demand for rebuild services. It has been sad to drive by there these last few years and see the empty parking lots and unused facility.....I had a lot of good work experiences there and really, it was probably one of my favorite jobs, second to what I do now. One of these days I will get all of the photo's I took there scanned in and build a slide show or book or something....
