From: schrammj@mst.edu
Subject: CB&Q E7 9935B
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 17:01:50 +0000
Hi all,
Thanks for your information about CB&Q E7 9935B. It turns out it was scrapped
in 1972 after a 23 year career in passenger service. It appears that the
experiment of using synthetic diesel fuel had no long term negative effects.
There’s
a photo online of it with a green BN painted nose. It is NOT the E9 on
display in Texas. The locomotive pulled a special chartered train from St.
Louis to Louisiana, MO and back for special guests on the occasion of the
dedication of the Bureau of Mines synthetic
liquid fuels demonstration plant in May, 1949. I did find evidence in the
National Archives just recently that before the full scale test a sample of
synthetic diesel fuel was sent to the CB&Q testing lab in Aurora where it
“exceeded requirements” for use.
The military ultimately tested over 1 million gallons of liquid fuels from the
plant in everything from jeeps to aircraft and found they were, “as good or
better” than conventional gasoline and diesel fuels.
The attached photo is from the official Bureau of Mines 1949 report.
This locomotive played a small part in a much larger project that I’m
researching for an article and chapter in a book. Here’s a short summary.
At the end of World War II the United States sent several groups of scientists
and engineers to Germany to search out and retrieve scientific and
technological artifacts and personnel that
could prove potentially useful in the ongoing war against Japan and the coming
cold war with the Soviet Union. Project Paperclip was one of these technology
retrieval operations. While the use of German scientists recruited during
Project Paperclip in the
space race of the 1950s and 1960s is well known and has long been a part of
popular culture, there were other aims of Project Paperclip. One effort was to
retrieve scientists, engineers and apparatus from German synthetic fuels
plants. The Bureau of Mines
had long been aware of German research in producing liquid fuels from coal.
When German wartime advances were combined with a postwar emphasis on energy
independence and with worries about a coal industry in decline the Bureau
initiated its synthetic liquid
fuels program. The Louisiana, Missouri plant was a major part of this large
program. German scientists and equipment were transported to Louisiana and
combined with American equipment and researchers to transform a former wartime
synthetic ammonia plant
into a full scale test plant for converting coal to liquid motor fuels. The
plant was a resounding technological success, successfully producing 1.5
million gallons of liquid motor fuels from coal and at efficiencies greatly
improved from German wartime plants
built just a few years earlier. The economics of production were however
hotly debated and ultimately, with a new conservative Congress and Republican
President, served to help kill the program. It was significantly cheaper to
import oil from the expanding
oilfields of the middle east with war surplus tankers than to develop a
domestic synthetic fuel industry costing billions of dollars. The plant was
sold to Hercules Chemical, converted back to a synthetic ammonia and urea plant
and remains in operation today.
(Some German made apparatus remains on site.) The program was a source of
great pride for the community and is fondly remembered by local citizens even
today, 60 years after the Bureau eliminated the program.
The Synthetic Fuels program was widely reported in the technical and trade
press and did get some newspaper coverage in the late 1940s and early 1950s but
there is little written with an historical perspective. If any of you are
really
interested in this program, I can send you some citations.
Thanks again!
Jeff
Jeff Schramm, PhD
History and Political Science Department
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Rolla, Missouri
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