Synthetic

Out of St. Louis one day last week glided a diesel-powered Burlington train with a cargo of bigwigs from the coal, oil and auto industries and the Department of the Interior. The big diesel was burning oil made from coal--the first time in U.S. railroading that a train has ever run on synthetic fuel.

The train swung 188 miles up the Mississippi to the sleepy, picturesque town of Louisiana, Mo. There the passengers witnessed the dedication of two plants, developed by the Bureau of Mines at a cost of $15 million, to convert coal into oil. This was the biggest step the U.S. had yet taken to create a synthetic oil industry against the possibility of war or of exhaustion of petroleum reserves.

The plants which made the oil that drove the dedication train will turn out about 400 gallons a day--at least ten times as much as has been produced in any of the 15-odd smaller pilot plants so far built by Government and industry. But it was still far short of the 10,000-gallon daily production of a full-sized commercial plant on the scale of those that powered Germany's Luftwaffe during World War II.

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