Submitted photo
The sign outside the Cummins Inc. Jamestown Engine Plant is pictured.
Cummins Jamestown Engine Plant, located in Busti, will host a community open house on July 20 as the engine manufacturer marks its 50th year in the Jamestown area.
The event, scheduled from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. will include plant tours, lunch provided by Basil & Bones while supplies last, historical and current engines on display, Cummins merchandise, music provided by Cummins employees, activities for children and an on-site career fair at the company’s 4720 Baker St. location.
Cummins took over the former Art Metal plant in Busti in 1974, with the plant initially producing about 65 engines a day. Now, the Jamestown Engine Plant produces about 400 engines a day. It also took time for employment at the Jamestown Engine Plant to reach its peak as new permanent assembly lines were built over Cummins’ first five years in Busti. It took nearly three years for the Jamestown Engine Plant to ship its first production engines to a Cummins customer.
About halfway through its tenure in Chautauqua County Cummins’ prospects locally seemed murky. In mid-2001, Cummins officials decided to discontinue development of a new heavy-duty engine that was to have been built at the Busti plant. That decision created doubt among many about the future. Roughly halfway through 2021, Cummins saw United States sales volumes for heavy-duty trucks, pickup trucks and recreational vehicles decrease between 20% and 60%, prompting a companywide evaluation. The disintegration of a proposed joint venture between Cummins and Navistar in June 2001 also brought to an end a use for a projected new engine line at the Jamestown Engine Plant. The decision not to develop engines for Navistar saved Cummins roughly $200 million, according to press reports at the time, but Cummins officials were still forced to ask both New York state and the state of Indiana for help. Cummins asked the state for $65 million as part of a $100 million project while asking Indiana for a $35 million loan.
But in October 2002 the decision was announced to close a location in Columbus, Ind., and keep the Jamestown site open in a move that saved $15 million in 2003 and $20 million a year in subsequent years. Rather than close the Jamestown plant, the news brought an expansion.
The Cummins Jamestown Engine Plant is in the midst of a $452 million project to prepare for full-time production of Cummins’ X15N engine, a new offering that has already started production in Jamestown with increased production necessary in the next couple of years as tougher environmental regulations take effect. The X15N engine is the next generation of the venerable X15 engine and is the industry’s first fuel-agnostic internal combustion engine platform that leverages a range of lower carbon fuel types. The fuel-agnostic architecture of the 15-liter platform utilizes a common base engine with cylinder heads and fuel systems specifically tailored for it to use carbon-free hydrogen or biogas with up to a 90% carbon reduction. The company will also continue producing the X15 engine.
“Even recently we’ve made some advancements in the assembly line itself,” said Brett Merritt, Cummins engine business president, during a media conference call earlier this year. “Lengthening it to lower tack time and again we get into the specifics of the manufacturing world but essentially increasing our output. We believe we’ll need more engines. We already on a daily basis make well over 450 engines a day in Jamestown. So we’ve already made investments there. Second we make machine heads and blocks. Most of that is done in Jamestown itself and we’re making a mass investment into entirely new machining for the next generation. And then we are also doing some other base componentry investment as well which will also be done in Jamestown. … What you would see today if you walked around is a lot of blocked off space, machines moving, lots of construction equipment. You will know that we’re making an investment just by watching it.”