Articles Tagged with ''Chicago manufacturing''

JOLIET, IL—Lion Electric Co. recently celebrated the official opening of a 900,000-square-foot facility here that will assemble battery-powered school buses and trucks.

For decades, General Motors was king of the highway and queen of the rails. In addition to mass-producing buses, cars and trucks, the automaker was once the largest locomotive builder in the world. At a massive factory just west of Chicago, GM’s Electro-Motive Division (EMD) assembled powerful machines that helped transition American railroads from steam to diesel.

Once upon a time, many of the fuel gauges, speedometers and other mechanical instruments used in automobiles and other vehicles were made ion the North Side of Chicago by Stewart-Warner Corp.

Up until a few decades ago, instrument panels in most vehicles consisted of a smattering of simple analog buttons, dials, gauges, knobs and needles. Today, mechanical speedometers and tachometers have gone the way of bench seats, hood ornaments, hub caps and running boards.

The West Side of Chicago was once the epicenter of the bicycle manufacturing industry.