Metso celebrate Lokomo centenary
100 years – from steam locomotive manufacturer to crushing equipment competence centre
METSO’s Tampere unit in Finland, better known locally as Lokomo, is this month celebrating its one hundredth year of industrial existence. Oy Lokomo AB commenced operations in Tampere in April 1915 and today is Metso’s most important global competence centre for mobile crushers.
‘Lokomo’s one-hundred-year history is indicative of its ability to transform and be innovative, and to remain at the cutting edge of technology over the course of a century,’ said Metso’s president and CEO, Matti Kähkönen.
‘Throughout its history, Metso’s Tampere unit has boldly transformed and developed fresh innovations to meet the needs of the day. An excellent example of this is the unit’s evolution into a globally significant crushing equipment competence centre for today’s Metso.’
Pirjo Virtanen, Metso’s vice-president of operations and site manager, added: ‘The Lokomo unit’s success and development into the nerve centre of Metso’s crushing technology over the course of one hundred years wouldn’t have been possible without the thousands of Lokomo employees who helped to build the unit into a strong and internationally significant Metso competence centre.’
Lokomo started its operations in 1915 as a steam-engine factory competing with the local Tampella. The company’s name stems from the word locomotive. Just a couple of years later, Lokomo manufactured its first crushers, which were delivered to the National Board of Public Roads and Waterways. A key driver behind the production of locomotives and crushers was the company-owned steel foundry.
Lokomo has manufactured a wide-ranging portfolio of products through the years, including church bells, peat harvesters, steamrollers, road graders, mobile cranes and forestry equipment. Two deep-sea diving bells manufactured for the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Education and Science were the source of a minor foreign policy scandal.
The Tampere factory, which has more than 700 employees, manufactures the bulk of Metso’s mobile crushing plants, of which more than 7,000 have been manufactured over 30 years.
