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(erielack) ELHS Eastern Region Spring Meeting

Since no one's posted it yet, here's my quick assessment of this past
weekend's ELHS Eastern Region Spring Meeting - not meant to be detailed
at all, just my off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts.

I missed the first presenter since I wasn't able to get to the meeting
until 11:45 (maybe someone else can fill the details in?), but the
second presenter was one I was looking forward to - Preston Cook (former
EMD employee and long-time ELHS member) gave his uber-presentation
called "Inside EMD" which was a long (2 hours!) and detailed
presentation about the inner workings at EMD's now-demolished La Grange,
Illinois plaint. Yes, the plant that produced the Erie and DL&W's
F-units and Geeps and EL's GP35s and SD45-variants.

It seems long, but Preston's narration comes from experience, and his
explanations of the various stages of locomotive construction was
thorough and understandable from a layman's point of view. Utterly
fascinating! The show concluded with a poignant overview of the people
that made the locomotives - EMD employees. A nice show!

Perry Billington gave a great show of the DL&W/EL from his hometown area
in Orange, NJ, and then when he moved to the Scranton area, a great
selection of shots there, concluding with many views of the
not-often-seen Bloomsburg Branch. Particularly neat were the views of
the circus train being pulled by EL Geeps along this backwoods branch.

Bill Greenberg did a neat presentation of his "Erie side" views of both
Erie and EL - as always, good stuff from Bill.

After the dinner break, Jack Emerick showed a small batch of his slides
(small in amount but LARGE in content - to this author at least - great
interior shots of the Mountain View, NJ tower!). And for a very nice
change of pace, after his slides, Jack proceeded to talk (sans slides)
about railroad operations on the DL&W and EL for a good half-hour. With
many, many funny anecdotes and interesting factoids on operations (Jack
says he just kept diaries wherever he went, he has 90 full diaries of
info!), it was a wonderful discussion. Even more interesting was the
obvious love for the railroads and the cameraderie he had with all the
employees. He worked for both DL&W ("God's Railroad!", as he referred to
it with a sly grin) and the Erie - after joking about his opinion with
the Lackawanna, he acknowledged that both the DL&W and Erie were great
railroads with great people. It's nice to hear these type of stories,
and Bob Mohowski asked Jack if he'd put these into book form, which
garnered a rousing round of applause. Let's hope Jack considers it;
they're simply wonderful stories.

Oh yeah, since I'm sure people will ask, the Archive Steering Committee
Chairman (Larry DeYoung) did discuss progress on this front, and I think
most of the people on this list will be happy when they hear his
discussion and commentary - I'm assuming this will be formally brought
up in the next Extra Board?

Overall, another great meeting. :)

	- Paul


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