Trinity Industries- Closing Wind Power Manufacturing for Tar Sands

from Root Force

We recently reported that Trinity Industries is one of two companies scrambling to fill back orders for 48,000 tank cars to ship tar sands.  Seems like Trinity has a great plan in mind to increase their manufacturing capacity- for rail cars anyway….

In late 2012 Trinity purchased 3 manufacturing facilities from DMI Industries.  While the 3 facilities were used to fabricate wind towers for industrial wind turbines, it is expected that Trinity will be converting them to build more tank cars for the Tar Sands industry.  Steve Barger, analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. said, “We do not expect that Trinity[TRN] intends to expand its own wind tower business given it is currently converting some of its own wind tower manufacturing

capacity to support increased tank car production… Instead, we expect TRN intends to usethese facilities to support the manufacturing of railcars.”

While wind power isn’t the end all be all it gets credit for- we still think it’s just down-right rude to make it possible to ship tar sands by any means.