Over the past year the local economy saw a lot of changes, starts and halts resulting in a time of transition for the area.

On the down side Trinity Industries Inc. closed its Greenville Rail Car Division in December. Two years earlier the Greenville operations hit a peak employment of 2,000. But a few months before the closing the two plants had only several hundred workers. Trinity blamed the closing on dwindling orders for rail cars.

Another casualty was Cooper Energy Services which closed its Grove City plant in the fall. The plant that produced engines and motor-driven compressors for the gas and oil industries employed 500 a few years ago but that figure declined to about 200 as orders fell.

But the plant closings didn’t result in the kind of widespread unemployment that followed the industrial contraction of the early 1980s. In December, Mercer County’s jobless rate stood at a healthy 4.7 percent, down from November’s 5 percent rate.

It was higher than the state’s 3.8 percent and the national 3.7 percent rate. However, unemployment was far lower than the 20 percent suffered nearly two decades ago when local plants were closing left and right.

Local mills that had been mothballed began showing signs of life in 2000.

Winner Development LLP bought the former Westinghouse Electric Corp. plant in December 1999 and was eventually awarded $8.25 million in state funds to resurrect the former transformer plant closed in 1985. Housed along Sharpsville Avenue in Sharon, Winner Development has an ambitious $83 million plan to develop the sprawling plant for multi-tenant use.

Sharpsville Quality Products found itself in a bind as the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July and halted operations in the fall. But just last week the Sharpsville foundry was sold to Hempfield Partners. The Pittsburgh company plans to resume operations, albeit at a reduced level at first.

In 2000, 19 major development projects with total investments of $79.5 million in land, building, machinery and equipment were reported by Penn-Northwest Development Corp., Mercer County’s lead economic development agency.

With the former Westinghouse, Cooper and Trinity plants now available, the county has 3 million square feet of industrial buildings awaiting development.

Technology was a common thread to be found in the stories of both successful and unsuccessful local companies. Those lacking in modern technology found themselves on the skids. Others invested in plans to modernize their operations to gain a competitive advantage.

Throughout the area technology has found its way into classrooms, hospitals and the shop floor. This year’s Outlook, a special multi-section edition in today’s Herald, has a theme of "2001: A Technology Odyssey.’’

Outlook explores such various uses of technology as heart-bypass surgery at Sharon Regional Health System, the launch of local Internet service by cable television provider Adelphia and Joy Cone Co.’s new baking ovens to produce ice cream cones.

Even companies that a generation ago never had so much as an electric typewriter on the shop floor now employ computers everywhere.

At Sharon Tube Co.’s Wheatland Cold-Draw plant in Wheatland and Farrell, the pipe and tube producer uses a Reika Work machine. With 11 computers it can cut and steer pipes to the proper section of the plant for the next step of production.

The machine is capable of recognizing if a pipe has a bad section and then cut out the steel to save as much of the good piece as possible.

For Sharon Tube, technology has been a good friend, said Lee Hooper, company president.

"Technology has allowed us to grow our business without adding support staff,’’ Hooper said. "Because of the user-friendly technology now available, it has put us in the forefront to our customers to the point where we’ve gotten business we otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.’’

Using computers instead of paper documents to manage production, the company can process orders faster and decrease the need for excess inventory. The Web site at sharontube.com enables customers to communicate instantly with Sharon Tube over the Internet to track the status of their orders.

"Through our technology we’ve become more valuable to our customer,’’ Hooper said. "The more value you bring to customers the less likely you are to lose them.’’