Bright lights, air conditioning, locker rooms, lunch rooms, a self-propelled floor-sweeping machine and a different shop for every specialty – this isn’t your father’s fix-it shop.

Ziegler Inc.’s Central Iowa Caterpillar dealership went first-class when it constructed a huge sales/repair/rental facility at the intersection of Interstate 80 and U.S. Highway 65 in Altoona. As a privately held company, Minneapolis-based Ziegler doesn’t reveal financial information, but you can get some idea of the scope of its investment from a few basic statistics about the new facility:

_ Two buildings, parking and outdoor equipment storage cover 42 acres.

_ The two buildings enclose 200,000 square feet.

_ More than 200 people work there.

_ The operation boasts one-day delivery across two-thirds of Iowa for more than 50,000 Caterpillar parts.

The dealership, which had been located at 10315 Hickman Road in Urbandale since 1974, began using its new home March 1 after a long construction phase. It’s designed to serve customers in western, central and northeastern Iowa.

Drawing on a vast, bar-coded parts inventory, Ziegler Cat employees can fill about 85 percent of daily repair needs and outside orders. To handle the rest, the dealership runs an elaborate daily shuttle service that moves parts between the Altoona complex and other Ziegler stores. A truck leaves for Kansas City every afternoon, arrives back in Altoona by 11 p.m. and proceeds to Sioux City. Another truck goes to Mason City to rendezvous with a truck from Minneapolis. Drivers even go to customer locations and job sites to place parts in locked metal boxes during the night.

It’s an important part of serving construction companies. “The cost of downtime is very high for our customers,” noted Bill Bergeth, administrative manager of the local dealership. “We can hit 42 drop points in one night.”

For a visitor to the Altoona facility, however, the impressive part of the business is its sheer physical scale. Semitrailer tractors fill one huge shop; some of them are chained down in the dynamometer room first, where their engines and transmissions can operate at highway speed while a computer figures out which parts need attention. And upstairs, the truck drivers have their own lounge where they can wait while repairs are being made.

Another big bay holds heavy construction equipment and farm tractors. The parts to be repaired – wheel bearings, engines, backhoe attachments – dwarf the mechanics.

In the smaller building of the two, a paint shop stands waiting for the special booth to be brought from the old location; next door is a wash bay big enough for any Cat equipment that’s likely to pass through the shop; and next to that is a shop devoted to refurbishing worn tracks from crawler equipment. Another shop is used strictly for welding.

In the rental warehouse, industrial-sized scissor lifts sit in a line, each plugged into an electrical outlet to keep its battery charged. Shelves hold generators, saws, pumps and any number of other rentable tools.

And, of course, you can buy a brand-new bulldozer, backhoe or anything else painted the traditional Caterpillar yellow.

The spacious office areas feature one conference room after another and an auditorium big enough for 170 people; it can be divided into two smaller rooms when needed – one entrance labeled with the Iowa State Cyclones logo and the other honoring the Iowa Hawkeyes. In other rooms, full-time trainers teach specialized classes to mechanics who repair Cat equipment down the hall or for some other company.

Thirteen field service mechanics fan out across Central Iowa to save equipment owners a trip to Altoona. Back at the office, technical communicators stand by to search for solutions to the field mechanics’ problems. The facility also houses the dealership’s credit and financing offices.

The view out the huge front windows offers mostly farm ground now, but Ziegler owns nearly 100 more acres that it expects to develop into industrial sites.

W.H. Ziegler founded the parent company in 1914 and opened an 80-square-foot office in downtown Minneapolis. Ziegler Inc. bought Gibbs/Cook, the largest Iowa Caterpillar dealer, in 1987. Other branch offices in the state are located in Fort Dodge, Mason City, Postville and Sioux City. Ziegler employs more than 1,100 people in 17 cities and towns in Iowa and Minnesota.