TIME CLOCK

LIGHTWEIGHT TRAIN will be built by General Motors this summer. Called Train Y, it will carry 400 passengers at better than 100 m.p.h. in low-slung, luxuriously appointed cars, each with a pantry and rest room at one end, a vestibule with steps for both high and low platforms at the other. Cost, excluding engine: $400,000.

URANIUM mining and milling have increased about 400% since 1950, with a projected 1,100% increase slated for 1956, says the AEC in its first announcement of production statistics. Ore reserves have already jumped 1,100% since 1950 and are still soaring.

TARIFF CUT FOR SWISS imports will soon go into effect, in an effort to mollify the watchmaking nation for last year's tariff boost of up to 50% on watches. In all, some nine items (from lace to taxi meters) have been dropped an average 44% ; however, the cuts will by no means wipe out the full impact of increased tariffs.

WHEAT SUPPORTS will drop to their lowest level since the war, whether or not farmers approve strict marketing quotas for 1956. If farmers approve the quotas, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson will peg prices at an average 76% of parity, v. 82 1/2% this year. If farmers kick over the quotas, the support price will automatically drop to 50%. Benson's reasoning on the 76% figure: with forecasts for the smallest wheat crop (845 million bu.) in twelve years, 1956 will be a good year to cut down the mountain of surplus farm products that the U.S. must now buy under its support program.

COAL MERGER between Chicago's Peabody Coal Co. and the Sinclair group of coal companies will form the nation's second biggest commercial producer, right behind the giant Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co. Peabody will get the Sinclair group for $34 million, exchange its stock for stock of the eight companies making up the combine. Joint sales: some 22 million tons of bituminous coal annually v. 25 million tons for Pittsburgh Consolidation.

HOME HEATING-PLANT prices will go up this fall because of the rising price of steel. Though sales are booming (up 20% in some cases this winter) for most of the 300 companies in the highly competitive field, most manufacturers report that they can no longer absorb increasing costs of raw materials, will have to boost prices, possibly as much as 5%.

URANIUM FEVER has hit the huge Pacific Northwest Pipeline Corp., soon to build a $168 million pipeline from New Mexico's San Juan gas field to West Coast markets (TIME, Dec. 27). Workmen laying pipe through uranium-rich eastern Utah-western Colorado plateau area will be equipped with Geiger counters so that Pacific Northwest will not risk bypassing any promising ore vein.

RUSSIAN RUBBER-BUYING is being sharply stepped up after a two-year lapse. Red agents in Europe's rubber markets have bought some 15,000 tons of natural rubber for delivery in the next eight weeks, 30 times more than they bought in all of 1954. Rubber experts speculate that Russia's expanding armament industry is now using more rubber than either its synthetic plants (annual capacity: about 250,000 tons) or its faithful satellites can produce.

POTATO PANIC on the New York Mercantile Exchange a fortnight ago (TIME, June 13) was the result of an attempt to manipulate prices, says the U.S. Agriculture Department. Agriculture charges that Winn & Lovett Grocery Co., a big southern retail chain (200 stores in five states), tried to force prices down by circulating "false, misleading or knowingly inaccurate reports," and that the company sold 1,003 car lots of May potato futures "with knowledge of the fact that they did not have and would be unable to obtain potatoes to deliver."

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