Facts & Figures

Crisis Crimped? Office of Defense Transportation Director J. M. Johnson announced that freight-car production in October reached a postwar peak of 8,394. He hopes that the goal of 10,000 cars a month, scheduled for September, might be reached this month. Reversing a three-year trend, the U.S. in the last two months has built more cars than have been scrapped.

Stock Tunes. The New York Stock Exchange, "in the interest of encouraging sound investment and responsible ownership of securities," will sponsor its first radio program, a weekly 55 minutes of "good" musical recordings (on Manhattan's highbrow WQXR), beginning the end of this month. Quipped one bearish New Yorker: "The theme song should be 'Where Has My Little Dog Gone?'"

Black on Red. American Airlines Inc. made a net profit of $1,272,514 in the third quarter of this year, thanks largely to its new fleet of DC-6s. But the improvement in earnings was not enough to offset the first quarter's loss: operations for the first nine months still showed a net loss of more than $1,000,000.

Solid Consolidation. In Wilmington, Del., a U.S. district court approved the purchase of Los Angeles' Consolidated Steel Corp. by Columbia Steel Co., a U.S. Steel subsidiary. The Department of Justice had argued that the $8,000,000 deal would stop healthy competition in steel fabricating in the west (TIME, March 3), but the court could not see it.

Fission & Fusion. Stockholders of Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corp. approved a plan to separate the company from its non-aviation interests, including a general manufacturing plant (stoves, frozen food storage units, etc.) in Nashville, Tenn., and part ownership of the ACF-Brill Motors Co. They will be incorporated in a new company, the Nashville Corp. By the deal, Convair's present parent, Victor Emanuel's Avco Manufacturing Corp., will get the controlling interest in the new company. Floyd Odium's Atlas Corp., Convair's second biggest stockholder, will take control of the aviation properties.

Biggest Inch. In Santa Fe Springs, Calif., near Los Angeles, the first gas came from the "Biggest Inch" this week. The 1,200-mile pipeline will carry about 300,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas a day from the Texas Panhandle to the fuel-starved West Coast. The line, built at a cost of $70 million in a record nine months, took its name from the last 214-mile stretch of 30-inch pipe, biggest "high test" pipeline ever laid.

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