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Summer/Fall 2005
Canadian Pacific Railway Employee Communications
Room 500 401-9th Ave
S.W. Calgary AB T2P 4Z4
Straight Talk from Cesar Vergara
by Greg Gormick
GE's Next
Generation Passenger Locomotive.
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Cesar Vergara.
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Vergara's job is perhaps unique in North American railroading. He's an industrial designer who gives trains their
style, following in the footsteps of those who created the legendary streamlined locomotives and rolling stock of the
1930s and '40s.
His portfolio of designs includes the new look for New Jersey Transit's latest rakish diesels and Amtrak's Pacific
Northwest Talgo Trains, a super-sleek version of France's TGV. In addition, he was the principle
designer for General Electric's Genesis passenger units, used extensively by Amtrak and VIA, and is now working on
GE's Next Generation Passenger Locomotive.
Momentum: How did you get into this professional combination of art and engineering?
CV: I must say I did not grow up a rail buff. It was drawing that fascinated me as a boy and also going to
construction sites with my father. The transportation connection began in Sweden. As is not unusual in Europe, I
didn't have a car and I went everywhere by bicycle, transit, or train. I came back to the States briefly after
graduation, but went back to Sweden to try to get a job with one firm that really impressed me. I did and, as it
turned out, they were working on the X-2000 high-speed passenger train. That was the first
train I worked on, as a member of the team.
Momentum: Why the passion for railroading from that first contact?
CV: A lot of the work on the X-2000 had to do with crashworthiness, even to the extent of ensuring
it was shaped so if you hit a deer or elk, it would just slide off the nose. Crashworthiness is a big part of good
industrial design. You want a sleek look, but first and foremost, you have to make it safe. As part of my design
schooling, I had done a six-month work term with a man who did all the crashworthiness projects for
Volvo. It was a completely new part of the design world for me; very technical in an otherwise artistic field. I took
to it like a duck to water and did my thesis on it.
Momentum: After exposure to the automotive industry, why not go in that direction?
CV: I thought cars were nice, but not for me. It was a conscious decision that came from the European
influences. There, trains are part of the answer, not part of the problem. And they're part of the mindset. I could
see trains were good things for our society and I wanted to be involved in helping them make a greater contribution.
But I also thought most North American trains were awful looking.
Momentum: Do you think they once were attractive?
CV: Yes, those streamliners of the 1930s and '40s were graceful, vibrant, and beautiful, as if they'd been
sculpted. However, as romantic as you want to get about them, you can't keep repeating the same designs. You must
move on and, I felt, the railways hadn't. That's unfortunate because railways created the whole concept of industrial
design, even before the car industry.
Momentum: So what did you do about changing that?
CV: After coming to New York and working on things such as John Deere tractors, I was encouraged by some Latin
American acquaintances here to go back to Mexico. This was before the national railway was privatized. So, I very
boldly went in and demanded an interview with the president and said I wanted to be the railway's chief designer. He
created the job for me and I worked on all kinds of interesting projects, such as designing new benches for their
passenger stations, creating new paint schemes for various trains, and refurbishing the vintage presidential private
car. Next, I joined Amtrak as manager of car design in 1990.
Momentum: Was that when Amtrak's president was Graham Claytor?
CV: Yes, and he was a wonderful man who loved trains. He'd been head of the southern Railway, a world War Two
hero, and former Secretary of the Navy, but very unpretentious. He approved my hiring. And it was because of him that
the Genesis passenger locomotive came about.
They were going to buy new diesels and there were already specs and an initial design. I went to him and asked to be
allowed to apply industrial design and styling to it. I could see this was historic because it was the first
all-new passenger engine in North America in about 40 years. The previous ones were modified freight
units that could be resold if Amtrak went out of business.
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F40PH.
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Mr. Claytor understood how much industrial design had once meant in railroading and what it could do to help Amtrak's
image. And I knew it was the big chance I needed if I was going to be significant in the world of railroading.
Momentum: The Genesis is now the workhorse of passenger railroading. Why do you think that design works so
well?
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Genesis.
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CV: It's really Design 101. It's form following function, which is the key principle of good industrial design.
The Genesis project is a good one to use in explaining what I have to do in my work for railways. I had to work
within specs that were already set, such as weight and structural strength.
It had been suggested that it should be curved in the front and make use of fiberglass or composite materials. I
wanted it to be all steel and very tight in the front, giving it a look with character and a kind of nautical feeling,
like a ship's bow. Some of the tucking at the front was not styling, but purely for tight clearances on curves.
I also had to be aware of the manufacturing process and what could and couldn't be done at a reasonable cost with
steel. I think the result is a clean, somewhat Scandinavian look that suggests speed and strength.
Momentum: They used to say designers put streamlining on and the mechanical department took it off. Have you
had that problem?
CV: No, because I consider industrial design to be subordinate to engineering. I'm not the engineer. My job is
to make engineering look good. When I first worked with some of the old timers at GE who cut and shaped steel, they
could see how logical it was. They enjoyed it. Something I learned in school and always apply to these projects is if
you can make it out of paper, you can make it out of metal. No compound curves. Just flat planes and sections of
cylinders and cones. You can do that with cardboard or sheet metal, even if it's thick.
Momentum: Is that how you do most of your work?
CV: I still like to draw and work with paper and cardboard. I'm from that pre-computer era when it
was like being a craftsman in the medieval guild tradition. But the people here at Jacobs got me a tablet computer
that is really a marvelous thing; no comparison with the old CAD systems.
This tablet has 7,500 tools and three million colours, and I just love drawing on it, because that's really what it
lets me do. I can load a photograph into it and draw over it, shaping it here and there as if it were a clay model.
This is technology catching up to art.
The Genesis was a design for the 1990s. This (GE's Next Generation Passenger Locomotive) is a design for the 21st
century and, I hope, produces a look that matches the advances in fuel efficiency and emissions and a whole host of
other things that GE has created under its skin. But it still started out with freehand sketches and paper models.
Momentum: Do you have any favourites among your projects?
CV: I've enjoyed them all, but the ones I like best are where I can do it all - inside and out. I got to do
that with Amtrak's Talgos for the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland service.
I got to continue the exterior look into the cars and make the experience complete. One of my greatest pleasures came
from an elderly Canadian passenger who said, "Young man, I think it's been 50 years since anyone has designed a
train from A to Z".
Momentum: Does industrial design have a role in freight railroading?
CV: Absolutely. First, (the emphasis on) freight and passenger are reversed in North America and Europe. They
excel in High-speed passenger overseas. But North American freight railroading is superior to anything
I've seen elsewhere. I think most people like trains, and you could make them really take notice of the freight
business if you applied some creative styling to these high-tech locomotives. Make the exterior as
advanced as the equipment inside them.
GE is a company that understands the value of industrial design and is thinking along these lines. I've had a
tremendous relationship with them on the Genesis and now the Next Generation Passenger Locomotive. I'm hoping
there'll be an opportunity to take that one step further with freight locomotives.
Momentum: You believe rail service has a great future, don't you?
CV: Without question. The love affair with the car is finite. A recent "Scientific American" article
said it's going to take thousands of little solutions to give us the big ones for urban sprawl, over dependence on
cars, and vanishing oil. One of those little solutions could be making our industry more attractive. Good design is
only about one percent of the cost, but it pays big dividends in its impact on people.
We don't need any more ugly things in this world and it costs as much to build an ugly train as an attractive one. My
whole career is built on that belief.
This Momentum magazine article is copyright
2005 by Canadian Pacific Railway and is reprinted here with their permission. All photographs, logos, and trademarks
are the property of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.
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