page_title: Orenstein & Koppel
section_title: Diversification
hierarchical_section_title: Orenstein & Koppel / Diversification
caption_attribution_description: Español: Línea H de subtes en Buenos Aires, tren en la estación Inclán (Argentina, noviembre 2008).jpg
context_page_description: Orenstein & Koppel was a major German engineering company specialising in railway vehicles, escalators, and heavy equipment. It was founded on April 1, 1876 in Berlin by Benno Orenstein and Arthur Koppel.
  Originally a general engineering company, O&K soon started to specialise in the manufacture of railway vehicles. The company also manufactured heavy equipment and escalators. O&K pulled out of the railway business in 1981. Its escalator-manufacturing division was spun off to the company's majority shareholder at the time, Friedrich Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp, in 1996, leaving the company to focus primarily on construction machines. The construction-equipment business was sold to New Holland Construction, at the time part of the Fiat Group, in 1999.
context_section_description: O&K expanded to build freight and passenger cars, and above all, excavators for construction.  The company also built other heavy equipment, including graders, dump trucks, forklift trucks, compressors, crawler loaders, wheeled loaders, road rollers, and truck cranes.
  The company also began manufacturing escalators, transmissions, rapid-transit railway lines, buses, tractors, and cargo ships. Passenger liners, shipboard cranes, and shipbuilding enterprises rounded out the company's profile. Because of the company's thriving export business, a worldwide system of branch offices was created.
  In the early years of the 20th century, O&K built bucket chain trenchers, at first from wood, and—after 1904—completely from steel. These were propelled by steam or oil engines. O&K also made railway trenchers for work in heavy soils.
  In the First World War, O&K built railway engines and cars of all sizes for the German government.  With the collapse of Imperial Germany in November 1918, the victorious Allies put further restrictions on German manufacturing and military capacity, seizing all army Feldbahn engines as per the terms of the Versailles Treaty that ended the First World War. The treaty also removed access to export markets; at the end of 1925, work stopped for three months as a result of the lost business. By 1935, business had recovered and the company produced 5,299 locomotives. After the war, O&K's American subsidiary, the Orenstein-Arthur Koppel Company, was seized by the Alien Property Custodian and sold at an auction where only United States citizens were allowed to place bids.
  Besides the Feldbahn contacts, the company produced Series 50 steam locomotives and standard rail gauge vehicles in the 1930s.  The company produced diesel locomotives, and Series 44 and Series 50 steam engines, for  the national railway company, Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft.
  In 1922, they manufactured their first continuous-track steam shovel. In 1926, diesel engines replaced steam engines; the company converted earlier steam units to diesel power as the need arose.  O&K merged with a kerosene-engine builder, selling the engines under the O&K banner.
caption: Siemens-Schuckert Orenstein & Koppel underground trains built for the Buenos Aires Underground from 1934-1944.
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