Trinity Industries
 | |
| Public | |
| Traded as | NYSE: TRN |
| Industry | Conglomerate |
| Founded |
Dallas, Texas, United States (1933) |
| Headquarters |
Dallas, Texas, United States |
Key people |
Timothy R. Wallace, Chairman of the Board, President and CEO; Chairman of Trinity Rail Group James E. Perry, CFO and Vice President D. Stephen Menzies, Senior Vice President; Group President of Trinity Rail William A. McWhirter, Senior Vice President; Group President Charles Michel, Vice President, CAO and Controller Mary E. Henderson, Vice President and Chief Audit Executive Virginia Gray, Vice President (Organizational Development) Antonio Carrillo, Vice President |
| Revenue |
 $US 4.4 billion (2013) |
|
$US 375.5 million (2013) | |
Number of employees | 9,270 (2010) |
| Website | www.trin.net |
Trinity Industries Inc. owns a variety of businesses which provide product and services to the industrial, energy, transportation and construction sectors.
Now, the company has five business groups which are Rail Group, Construction Products Group, Inland Barge Group, Energy Equipment Group and Railcar Leasing & Management Services Group.[1]
History
Founding
The company, first known as Trinity Steel, was founded by C. J. Bender in Dallas in 1933. W. Ray Wallace, an engineering graduate of Louisiana Tech, worked for Dallas's Austin Bridge Company in 1944 before joining the company in 1946 as its seventeenth employee. At the time Trinity Steel manufactured butane tanks in a Dallas County mule barn. In 1958 Trinity Steel merged with Dallas Tank Company, which was also founded in 1933, and Ray Wallace became the new firm's president and first chief executive officer. At the time Trinity had revenues reaching $2.5 million and employed 200 workers. While some employees of the firm in other states eventually unionized, Texas workers never formed a union. For a time the company profited by producing larger tanks that enabled it to enter the petroleum business and do steel fabrication for refineries. In addition, to free up capital, it established an investment company to buy trucks and lease them back to the firm. Nonetheless, by 1957 Trinity faced competition and declines in the petroleum industry. Dallas Tank, Trinity Steel, and Bender-Wallace Development Company merged in 1958 to form Trinity Industries, Incorporated, and went public.
1970s
In 1970 Trinity diversified with the acquisition of 153 acres (0.62 km2) of land adjacent to the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and in 1971 established its first real estate subsidiary. Acquisition of Mosher Steel in 1973, after initially contracting work out to them, enhanced the company's structural business. Among projects completed by the firm's structural division were the Texas Stadium, New York's World Trade Center, the Balboa Bridge in Panama, the Pennzoil Building, and two buildings in Moscow.
1980s
By the 1980s two subsidiaries, Gamble's Incorporated of Alabama and Mosher Steel of Texas, manufactured structural products including materials for drilling platforms, highway bridge components, commercial-high-rise buildings, and other girders and beams. The firm's marine subsidiary, Equitable Shipyards, produced LASH or Lighter Aboard Ship barges, riverboats for use by Hilton Hotels, and other craft for industrial uses. Hackney, Incorporated, its metal components subsidiary, produced materials for piping systems. Trinity produced completed railcars, including tank cars, hoppers, and gondolas to transport chemicals, coal, and other substances, at locations in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Longview, Texas, and held two railcar leasing subsidiaries. The company also produced containers for fertilizer, liquified petroleum gas, and nuclear fuel and waste. In 1981 the company acquired a metal fabrication firm at Channelview, Texas, and Babcock and Wilcox plants in Elkhart, Indiana, and Koppel, Pennsylvania, and in 1983 it acquired Halter Marine. In 1984 Trinity acquired the railcar designs from Pullman Company.
1990s
In the 1990s expansion continued with the acquisition of the Transit Mix Concrete and Materials Company of Beaumont, Texas, Beiard Industries, Syro Steel, and Stearns of Fort Worth, Texas, a major producer of airport equipment. By 1993 revenues exceeded $1.5 billion, and the firm employed 13,000 people.[2]
2001
Trinity Industries acquired the Thrall Car Manufacturing Company, which fabricates railroad freight cars, in 2001.[3]
June 2006
The company completed the sale of its weld pipe fittings business.
August 2006
The company sold its European Rail business to International Railway Systems S.A.
December 2006
During the year ended December 31, 2006, it made two acquisitions in the Construction Products Group.
April 2007
The company's subsidiary, Transit Mix Concrete & Materials Company, acquired a combined group of East Texas asphalt, ready mix concrete and aggregates businesses operating under the name Armor Materials.[4]
Product
Rail Group
The group manufactures and sells railroad cars (hopper cars, gondolas, flat cars, roll cars, intermodal cars, tank cars, etc.) and component parts. Its customers include railroads, leasing companies and shippers of products.
Construction Products Group
The group produces concrete, aggregates, highway products, beams and girders used in highway bridge construction. Its customers include contractors and subcontractors in the construction and foundation industry.
Guardrail controversy
In 2014 allegations came to light claiming that Trinity Industries made cost-cutting changes to guardrail designs that resulted in unsafe products being deployed on US highways. It has been alleged that in an effort to save approximately $2 per guardrail end, approximately one inch of metal was removed from these parts rendering a crucial safety feature of the guardrails inoperable. In accidents involving Trinity Industries guardrails, post-modification, some motorists suffered amputation and other serious injury when guardrails penetrated their vehicles upon collision, spearing vehicle and driver and in some cases shearing off legs and other appendages. As of 2014 several lawsuits regarding injured motorists were pending in US courts.[5] Citing safety concerns in September 2014, Missouri joined Nevada and was followed by Massachusetts in limiting use of the guardrails but the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) continued "to say that the guardrails, installed on highways in almost every state, meet crash-test criteria", per a mid-October report,[6] In days the Virginia Transportation Department joined in focusing on the issue.[7] Later in the month, a lawsuit went against the company, the FHWA asked for new tests, and the number of states banning the ET-Plus railing reached 13 then including Arizona, Connecticut and Louisiana. At this point, Trinity halted shipments of the product and planned new tests.[8]
The lawsuit that the federal jury decided against Trinity in October, 2014, was brought by Joshua Harman, a competitor of Trinity from Virginia who "filed the lawsuit against the company on behalf of the Federal Highway Administration under the False Claims Act". The Federal Highway Administration did not participate in the lawsuit. The verdict was for "$175 million, which, by law, will be tripled to $525 million. Trinity disputed the ruling. The money is to be split between the United States Treasury" and Harman, designated a whistleblower in the case. At the same time, Texas became the 14th state to halt installations of the product and Virginia became the first state to initiate removal planning. The deadline from FWHA for a testing plan was set to be October 31.[9]
For the testing procedure, the ET-Plus terminals were sampled randomly from California Department of Transportation inventory ("This was to ensure that the devices were fully representative of the devices actually on the roadway.") http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/guardrailsafety/retesting.cfm However, the controlling document was a 1997 technical memorandum from the Federal Highway Administration (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/legsregs/directives/policy/ra.htm), where the FHWA requires "The developer should also carefully choose which version of a device is to be tested. If a number of different sizes are proposed for use, then the "worst case" conditions, if predictable, should be tested. It may be that "worst case" conditions are not obvious and more than one version of a device will need to be tested."
Inland Barge Group
The group manufactures dry-cargo barges and hopper barges.
Energy Equipment Group
The group manufactures tank containers and tank heads for pressure vessels, propane tanks and structural wind towers.
Railcar Leasing and Management Services Group
The group provides fleet management, maintenance and leasing services.[10]
Trinity Industries Leasing operates DOT-111 Tank cars for lease in North America.
See also
References
- ↑ finance.google.com, Google Finance review
- ↑ Handbook of Texas Online
- ↑ "Trinity Industries Agrees to Acquire Thrall Car". New York Times. 2001-08-14.
- ↑ stocks.us.reuters.com
- ↑ Galli, Cindy (18 September 2014). "Outrage Over Guardrail Crashes Tied to Lost Limbs, Deaths". ABC News (ABC News). ABC. Retrieved 20 September 2014.
- ↑ Ivory, Danielle, and Aaron M. Kessler, "Highway Guardrail May Be Deadly, States Say", New York Times, October 12, 2014. Retrieved 2014-10-13.
- ↑ Kessler, Aaron M., and Danielle Ivory, "Virginia Threatens to Remove Guardrails Unless Manufacturer Performs New Tests", New York Times, October 14, 2014. Retrieved 2014-10-19.
- ↑ Ivory, Danielle, and Aaron M. Kessler, "Trinity Industries Halts Shipments of Highway Guardrails", New York Times, October 24, 2014. Retrieved 2014-10-24.
- ↑ Kessler, Aaron M., and Danielle Ivory, "Virginia to Remove Suspect Guardrails", New York Times, October 27, 2014. Retrieved 2014-10-27.
- ↑ finance.yahoo.com, Yahoo! Finance Review