Budd Burgeons

Philadelphia's Bustleton was bustling last week. Grey-haired, abstemious Edward Gowen Budd, 74, had just leased from RFC the $21-million. 24 1/2-acre. Bustleton war plant (in which Budd has produced planes and munitions for two years) for his famed auto-body and streamlined train-building company. Budd's lease had set a reconversion mark for U.S. industry (particularly Competitor Pullman); no other company had taken over a plant so big from the war-industry plants now on the block, and reconverted it.

The RFC deal was a five-year lease on 77% of the new plant (rental $649,806 a year), with an option on the other 23% if peacetime production should warrant it. It grooved nicely into Budd postwar plans. Budd's munition-making (8-inch shells, aerial fragmentation bombs) would go on until war contracts were filled.

Meantime, the whole, elaborate Budd railway car manufacturing division would be moved to Bustleton from its old cramped quarters in another part of Philadelphia. Tooling would start at once; production, set at a 600-car-a-year pace, would begin in the fall.

Timorous stockholders, who have borne previous Budd spending (Budd ideas have sometimes lost money at a million a clip), shuddered. But they had small reason. The company had over $19 million in working capital, and already held backlog orders for 700 railroad cars. Budd also expects to expand its truck-trailer business, plus its customary body-building orders from Ford, International Harvester, Chrysler, G.M., Nash and Studebaker. The railroad orders alone are greater than the company's entire prewar output.

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