GE Transportation, Wabtec Corp. merge in $11 billion deal

Interesting merger. Wabtec was the company that pioneered dispatching and running Iraqi railways remotely from Iowa of all places during the second Iraq War. If that technology has advanced further we might be soon looking at crew less freight trains in the very near future. I suspect that was the motivation for the merger. Railways in the United States want to move to crew less trains and hybrid or alternate fuel locomotives. GE is advanced in the alternate fuels area AND Wabtec is advanced in the crew less automation area. They will need more money invested to advance them into a marketing offering but if they are successful this could be a really good merger. Wabtec is the former Westinghouse Air Brake company. The innovation advanced because of the war in Iraq and the need to run trains in Iraq through insurgent areas without human losses and without needing a large protection force to parallel each train.