Caterpillar has just announced that it is closing its Toronto, Ontario plant which makes tunnel boring moles. Caterpillar bought world renowned Lovat Inc in April 2008. http://www.thestar.com/business/201...ril_2014_throwing_330_people_out_of_work.html
Huge corperations and niche markets just don't mix, I'm surprised caterpillar took them over in the first place. A few years back they closed the laval bucket facility that used to be run by hewitt, hey had the best excavator buckets you could get for our area, but they didn't align well enough after caterpillar took them over. Now we have to get buckets built because cats buckets just don't stand up around here.
Cat bought the lovat plant just so that they could get there hand on the big tunnelling job to extend the ttc subway to hwy 7. The market for tunelling equipment isnt very big at all, and i dont see many big tunnelling jobs happening in this area anytime soon.
Sounds similar to the brain wave of the Caterpillar hierarchy of branching into agricultural tractors with the rubber tracked Challenger 65 with an antique 3306 years back, what an abomination they were. Out here they were known as C@ts with thongs (slip on rubber sandels, flip flops or jandles as our New Zealand mates would say)