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(erielack) Advance 100

The meat business was unprofitable for several reasons, the most obvious being L&D. Quoting the late Bill Gale, "There wasn't a smart meat receiver in NY who ever paid a freight bill". He described how the contract truckers would siphon the fuel out of the tanks that supplied the refrig units so the cooling would quit enroute, and how the locals would turn them off as the trailers were interchanged. Switching to all-highway for additional pennies per pound gave meat shippers some assurance their goods would arrive intact. This is another example of customers shifting high-rated freight away from the hazards of unsupervised common carriage. EL was also constantly paying to replace meathooks that went missing at the consignees. The other big problem was the lack of backhaul for this exclusively eastbound traffic.

On the bright side, it would be fun to model Adv 100 if you were doing the late 60's. You would have a mix of nose- or belly-mount reefer trailers decorated for a variety of Granger roads ie CB&Q, MILW, CGW, CNW, CRIP including RIMT as well as IC and trailers with just reporting marks. Athearn recently announced the EL meat trailer with correct black lettering, good for loads shipped from Chicago packing houses. Athearn and A-line have appropriate detail parts (contact me off-list if you'd like parts nos.). You can also place a few meat trailers in the consist of regular TOFC trains NY-100 and PB-100, the latter hauling Boston trailers as well as a Binghamton setout for Victory Markets in Norwich.

Paul B

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.

Jim Gerofsky 





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