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(erielack) Advance 100
Thanks much to Bill McDonald for that explanation of what the short-lived
Advance 100 operation was about back in 1969. There's a nice shot of it on
p. 127 of Bob Collins' Erie RR Trackside. It was taken on March 16, 1969,
which indeed was a Sunday, at Arden NY, about 30-odd miles from Croxton.
The lighting at that location says around noon, maybe even before. So the
train must have left Chicago a bit before 6PM Saturday on that weekend. The
train had 4 E8s and 22 TOFC cars, and probably made a very fast run. But an
18 hour run across the EL was just not possible.
I would speculate that Advance 100 was the subject of an internal tug-of-war
within the EL. The marketing people that Bill almost worked for probably
wanted more time for the traffic to develop; maybe 6 to 9 months. The
accounting department at that time was possibly thinking about that big E-6
bond maturation due in late '69, and the havoc it was going to play with
EL's cash flow. A 20 or 30 car super hot-shot probably didn't fully
reimburse its operating costs (especially for refrigerated meat, which, as
Paul Brezicki pointed out earlier, generated a lot of L&D claims). From
what I heard, Adv 100 was gone by summer.
I do recall seeing some slides taken by Ray Scott in April 69 of a set of 4
or 5 Alco PA's coming into Croxton on Advance 100. He got a tip from one
of the dispatchers about it. The shots were "dusky", as it was a typical
Adv 100 arrival in Croxton around 6 or 7 PM. This might have been the PA's
last trip to the EL's east end, as they were traded-in later in 69.
Jim Gerofsky
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