Sunday, March 17, 2024

Book Talk

Google search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

A year ago today I published my E. L. Moore eBook: The Model Buildings of E. L. Moore. If you don’t have a copy, good news, I have an infinite supply of free ones and you can get yours here :-) You can also get a copy from Library and Archives Canada.


So far it’s had 872 downloads, which is 772 more than my wildest dreams. Downloads have petered off a lot as the months have rolled on. It does maybe 4 or 5 a week these days. I think that’s to be expected as there’s a limited readership for this sort of thing. 


Bing search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"
But, still, for an odd little digital monograph that’s had no notice in the traditional model railroading media, I’m quite surprised at the uptake. I hope it will keep circulating, and maybe E. L. Moore’s work will continue to inspire and entertain modellers young and old. 

DuckDuckGo search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"
I don’t see a 2nd edition on the horizon, although there are many gaps and weak spots in the research I’d like to fill if I can. If anything comes up you’ll read about it here. And, of course, if you know anything about E. L. Moore and his work, I’d sure like to hear about it and discuss it with you. 


Yahoo search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"
One of the book’s weakest parts are the paragraphs on what he did between being released from the navy in 1918 at the end of World War I and arriving in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1933. We only have glimpses of his life during this 15 year period: furniture salesman, paper mill worker, vagabond, and who knows what else. He seems to have moved around a bit in the eastern US. He was in New York for a while and there was some wandering in the Great Smoky Mountains. He hints at other places - even a county jail for loitering in some southern town! - in his model railroad articles, but that’s all they are, hints. It’s often impossible to discern what's real and what is Moore just pulling our leg.


Those hints of mid life adventure provide inspiration for many of his projects, as did his boyhood life on the farm prior to joining the navy. He read a lot, studied lots of photographs, and shot the breeze with friends in the hobby a lot, but that information obtained at a remove wasn’t all there was to his inspiration. His own direct experience seemed to be the foundation for his model building work, and he drew on it just as much as from those other sources, maybe more at times. 


A section of the AGO's Tom Thomson panel gallery

We were in Toronto in January and had the opportunity to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario. I wanted to see the Tom Thomson gallery. I hadn’t done any research prior to going. My Tom Thomson ‘knowledge’ at the time was basically: 1) Thomson was a revolutionary wilderness painter, 2) Thomson was tangentially associated with The Group of Seven, and 3) Thomson produced a number of now iconic Canadian landscape paintings. So, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.


Thomson is a big name in Canadian painting. Shelves and shelves have been written about him, but here’s his Wikipedia entry for a good summary. He was born in 1877, roughly a generation before E. L. Moore, who was born in 1898. Thomson died in July 1917 about a month before his 40th birthday. Even though he was a graphic designer by trade he practiced as a painter for only the last 5 years of his life. During those years he’d go up north to Ontario’s Algonquin Park in the good weather months for fishing, painting, and canoeing. His art activities consisted of making in situ sketch paintings on small wooden boards of the lakes, rivers, woodlands, trees, lumber camps, and bush. He’d winter in Toronto and turn many of his sketch paintings into proper saleable canvas paintings. To make this way of life happen during those years he appeared to live a very frugal existence.


Unlike Moore who died of arteriosclerosis at age 81, Thomson’s career was cut short when he was not quite half Moore’s age. On 8 July 1917 Thomson went missing on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park and his body wasn’t found until July 16. Some say he was murdered, others say suicide, others say it was simply a canoeing accident. The cause of his death remains a mystery, but what isn’t a mystery was he died at the height of his painting powers and we’re the worse off for it. 


A Thomson canvas painting near panel sources
It’s those sketch paintings he made while up north in the wilderness that caught my attention. I was aware of his larger canvas works, but those little on site sketches were news to me. All I can say is that when I saw them I felt, yeah, yeah, that’s what it’s like out there. I don’t know how he did it but I could feel that he had captured how it is in that environment. Now when I look at his canvas paintings they seem a little remote to me now that I’ve seen their sources.


Thomson's palette / sketch box (NGC photo)

He had a painting system of course so he could do his sketches while in a canoe or out in the woods. Anyone would have to have one so as not to make a mess of things. In preparation for painting season he’d make up a bunch of 8.5” x 11” wood panels, usually of birch, for painting his sketches on. He also had a custom palette / sketch box for taking into the field. That upside-down photo sourced from the National Gallery of Canada shows it. The upper part, at the bottom of the photo, has slots to hold two panels. They allow for a panel to be held for painting while a second panel waits its turn, or is drying. The lower part is for supporting the palette while painting. Two painted panels can be held securely and separately for transport back to camp without worrying about getting them smeared in transit. From that simple equipment, direct observation, and great skill came 400 or so amazing paintings on small wood boards.


After getting back home I found out there was a book published in 2023 about his field sketches called Tom Thomson: North Star. I can’t comment on the quality of its essays, but the draw for me are the 150 nearly full size colour reproductions of his sketch paintings. I recommend the book on the strength of those alone.


I’ve talked about the importance of direct field observation before. I think if we knew more about E. L. Moore’s life when he was ‘out in the field’ during those missing 15 years, we’d be able to better appreciate how his model work developed and its influences. Like Thomson I think Moore made extensive use of his experiences in his work, but unlike Thomson, the record of Moore’s life experiences is quite thin.


You know, maybe I should back away from saying things like “…we’d be able to better appreciate...” because it might only be me who could better appreciate. I don’t think many people are interested in this aspect of model railroading. I’m obsessed with origin stories and finding out influences. My own hobby horse is that direct observation and experience are the most important and best influences, especially in our era. 


In E. L. Moore’s stories he’d often talk about Cousin Cal. These days the friendly, affable, although sometimes slow and bumbling, Cousin Cal has been elbowed out of the way by Cousin SAL, Cousin Screen Attention Lock. SAL seems to be everybody’s cousin, even mine I must admit. He demands everyone’s attention at all times for all things. Seeing and experiencing for yourself without him mediating seems almost sacrilegious, and he’ll do his darnedest to convince you that it is. He encourages conformity and group think and that’s the last sort of influence anyone should want. He’s the influencer’s influencer. I suspect E. L. Moore would not have gotten along with Cousin SAL given that Moore didn’t have much truck with the dominant screen of his day, the tv, even though he did appear on it once. I don’t think Cousin SAL could convince him to watch Gilligan’s Island or The Beverly Hillbillies.


Yes, the irony of me pontificating about the evils of screens on a screen isn’t lost on me. Before I leave and try and stop my head from exploding from the contradictions, let me wrap up by noting two interesting books I found at the AGO gift shop.


The AGO has a large collection of ship models as part of the Ken Thomson collection. Although they share the same last name I don’t think Ken Thomson and Tom Thomson are related. Ken Thomson was at one time the wealthiest person in Canada and donated his vast art collection to the AGO in 2002, which included many works by Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven as well as a large number of high quality ship models. The 2009 paperback, Ship Models, published by Skylet documents the collection. It is obviously a subsidized publication as it’s an extremely high quality product that only cost me something like $14.95 in the gift shop. That’s crazy cheap for what it is: an excellent example of what a book about a scale model collection could be. Estimates I got for producing a similar sort of physical E. L. Moore book would have resulted in a typical retail price of $90US for US sales and $135CDN for Canadian - and those are with me making zero profit. At those prices even I wouldn’t buy my own book.


305 Lost Buildings of Canada was an impulse buy based on the title and intriguing cover. What you see is what you get. There are 305 of those blocky, black and white facade drawings, each with a paragraph telling something about the associated lost building. Although the drawings are sort of reminiscent of Seth’s Dominion caricatures they do give a sense of the buildings. If you’re interested in photos of the real things you can always go to the internet. 


View from Shell / Bulova Tower; late 70s or early 80s
When I stumbled across the entry for Toronto’s Shell Tower (aka the Bulova Tower) at Exhibition Place old memories bubbled up through my grey matter. In olden times I thought it was quite thrilling to go to the top of the tower and look out over the Ex. Maybe it was that memory lurking in my brain that got me to buy the book in the first place: the Shell Tower is dead centre on the book’s cover! Talk about subliminal messaging :-)

Well, a not so subliminal message is nagging me for coffee, so I’m off to refuel my grey cells before they all decide to explode.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Dimensioning the Imperial Six's foyer

The Imperial Six's foyer is a tricky thing. I've been putting off building it for quite some time. I think I've been a little intimidated by it.

Suitably fortified with a jug of coffee I decided to dive in and figure out the foyer's dimensions.

The job was something of a trial and error exercise where I consulted photos of the foyer and worked on resolving its elements with dimensions of standard size commercial doors and HO scale figures until I got an arrangement that looked right. You may recall I bungled the entry door size on Coles and wanted to get the Imperial Six looking correct before I started cutting plastic.

I cut a piece of Bristol board into an L-shape that would fit snuggly inside the model's foyer space and drew on the various elements in pencil. This temporary piece allowed me to see how the finished insert would look. I continued to make some adjustments at this stage to get things to look right. I realize the foyer is still 2-D at this point, but I tried to be mindful of the 3-D shapes and spaces that would result as I drew up the insert. It doesn't look too bad, so it's on to picking movies for the sign board :-)

Left and right walls are the same

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Buddy, do ya got a light?

Added LED strip.

Added interior box.

Empty interior box.

Worn sign.

Foundation leaks light.

Down on its luck.

When's the next streetcar get here?





The Toronto Three

E. L. Moore's Carolina Foundry in paper

Left: E. L. Moore's original | Right: Clever Models kit

Galen alerted me to this very decent paper model of E. L. Moore's Carolina Foundry by Clever Models. I couldn't resist doing a side-by-side comparison with Mr. Moore's original.

Monday, February 5, 2024

Design Notes on Sight Lines: Roads, Paths, Sidewalks, and Track

Main street on LOL II, aka the 'Way Out Layout'

Photographing the Red Car Barn revived my thinking about an organizing principle I like a model railroad to have: lines I can sight down. Along with buildings one can see into and through, I consider interesting sight lines essential. I like to have a sun roof in a car too, but that's another story :-)

These lines can be provided by roads, paths, sidewalks, and of course track. It was on the LOL that I first played with lines, mainly through the addition of roads and sidewalks to connect the different parts of the layout. I'd look at various areas and think, could someone walk or drive or cycle there, or if they took the train or streetcar, how would they get around when they got off? I made physical changes in answer to those questions.

I think when I had developed the layout to a certain point sight lines became obscure, and that was a contributing factor to me taking the LOL apart. Looking back, when I added a shelf extension for the World's Biggest Bookstore I inadvertently changed a long, open view of the main street into a canyon that was harder to look into. Some interesting pictures resulted, but in the end it was limiting.

Ocean Alley
The follow up to the LOL, the never finished Alta Vista TC, was a sight lines disappointment. I didn't learn from bad sight lines created on the LOL. I built a main road on the Alta Vista TC for the streetcars walled in on both sides by buildings. I focused too much on having open real estate for buildings, and not enough on looking at them and the streetcars once everything was in place. I'd have to look over the back sides of the buildings to watch the streetcars. Eventually it seemed to me that as well as being far too big for my workshop, it didn't have enough possible views, and was going to become a boring exercise in making buildings simply to fill in open spaces along the main drag. The main drag was a going to be a drag.

So, on LOL II, the main street (still unnamed) is built up on just one side so I can get as many long views, or sideways panoramas, as I can dream up. There're no buildings 'on the other side' blocking my view. The one way street, Ocean Alley (name still up in the air), is a quasi-canyon: buildings on one side and a broken edge of trees, buildings, rocks, and small buildings on the other, but there's a long, so far interesting sight line.

Then there's the sight line from the parking / unloading track that starts at Ocean Alley and sticks into the pad where the urban buildings are located.










And there's the view down the track that runs along the edge of the beach. You can also see the parking / unloading track that intersects Ocean Alley that I previously mentioned.










The last long sight line runs along the dirt path that starts around the Red Car Barn, snakes past the surf shop, beachside cottages and the Ocean View Hotel, and ends at the Barbecue off in the distance  



The bird's eye view shows dense packed buildings in the urban area. From above it's certainly not realistic, but there is method to my madness.

A few months ago I was cleaning up the workshop and moving things around. I collected up all the little buildings I could see and randomly set them on the layout just to get them out of harm's way. All of the Toronto buildings went upstairs and were placed on a shelf.

After I'd done a bit of tidying up I glanced over at the layout and rather liked the jumble of structures. It had that packed in feel I was looking for. Organizationally it was wrong, but it felt right.

The next day I started to slide the models around, looking for sight lines and opening walkways to the sidewalk along Ocean Alley. This created a number of secondary and shorter sight lines out to the ocean. I also found many of the buildings were in need of minor repairs, so maintenance was done along with urban planning. 

Planning a downtown Toronto micro layout
I also realized that my Toronto buildings were going to need their own little layout to properly capture the feeling I wanted to get across with them - that's something else I wasn't able to accomplish with the Alta Vista TC. 

While in an urban planning mood I did a bit of fiddling with those buildings too to see if a micro-layout would suffice. It turned out a layout a little larger than micro sized might work, but development of that is for another time.

I'm not done fiddling with the LOL II's organization, but I feel it's heading in the right direction. Maybe it always will be just heading somewhere and never really arriving. That's ok as long as it keeps heading to interesting configurations. 

I know this isn't model railroading. It's just me creating a layout based on what I like and want to look at. It's just playing around.

Getting back to the LOL II, this is one of the secondary walkways that connects main street to Ocean Alley. At the entry is the Towers discount store on the left and the Chapters on the right. You can see one of the tall beach spotlights off in the distance.

There are 4 of these secondary sight lines branching off the main street.


I made sure the little Centennial Experimental Farm, LOL III, layout also had a main sight line: the pedestrian gravel path that runs the entire length of the layout from the street .....


... to the apex of the turn around loop. The visual implication is that the path crosses the road and leads to the farm's other facilities.

There's also a secondary sight line along the gravel path that is used to lead the cows from an off site barn to the pasture on the layout. It crosses a road and the streetcar has to stop at the crossing.

So the paths lead the eye into the layout and are used to imply there's a surrounding world of which this is a piece.

 

Establishing sight lines on the Loonar Module was tricky, and I wasn't completely successful. I think it's because the layout is basically a circle.

In this case I tried to establish two leading into the centre of the island. One runs from the end of the dock and up the concrete steps to the shed at the top...

... and the other extends from the end of the causeway, across the circular test track, and up the gravel road to the parking spot.

I think in this case the visual interest is created by the 4 separate scenes - which blend into each other as one walks around the layout - carved out by the tall trees, which create an effective visual barrier. The Toronto layout will also use tall elements - skyscrapers instead of trees - to separate scenes.





EVRR's valley beyond the long dividing trestle
I'm not sure if E. L. Moore's Elizabeth Valley RR had any distinctive or signature sight lines. It doesn't look like it did. Maybe along the trestle that divided the layout in two?

I think what it was famous for was it's level of completion. Being a rather small layout at 4'x6' it was a good showcase of what a model railroader of modest means could achieve. The level of detail and finish that went into the layout was impressive, even by today's standards.

If it did have dramatic sight lines they would be difficult to photograph as it's my understanding that E. L. Moore used a Graflex press camera. Even a 35 mm SLR would be difficult to maneuver in and amongst the layout's features for dramatic perspective photos. The N-scale tribute layout and a digital camera might uncover some interesting views.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Red Car Barn

Last Sunday I was looking around for a small, simple kit to build to take my mind off things for a little while. I considered a few projects, but settled on AHM's Village Smithy. I had bought this model a few years ago with the goal of using it as a donor for refurbishing the one I built in the '70s. I figured, what the heck, just build it, refurbishment of the old relic can wait some more.

I decided not to go crazy on modifications as I wanted to finish it fast. I wanted to see if I could create a sense of flow by not prolonging construction. Considering my track record, I built this one dead fast: started on Sunday and added some finishing touches Friday. And yes, I entered that state of mental flow a few times and found the experience of building this barn quite pleasant.

At the outset I also decided it wasn't going to be a blacksmith. Since my very first E. L. Moore build back in '73 was a version of Bunn's Feed & Seed converted to an automobile garage I settled on this being a garage too. I think I'm fixated on garages these days, but it is what it is.

I'm not going to describe the barn's construction in detail as it's pretty simple. I'll just note a few minor changes.

I cut open the back wall where the little addition attaches to the main barn so that one can look all the way through the big front doors to the window in the addition's back wall.

The second storey hatch door on the front wall was replaced with an N scale Tichy Train Group window casting from my spares box. 

The base was cut away from the barn's floor and discarded. I should note that the floor was cut in such a way that it fit inside the barn and was surrounded by the walls instead of having the walls sit on top of it, which is the way the kit was designed. This meant the roof opening for the chimney had to be opened up a little so the chimney would properly sit on the floor.

Speaking of the chimney, it was moved to the back so that it didn't block the front entrance. The roof panels are symmetrical so flip-flopping the chimney to the back is no problem. Now, whether it is advisable to park gasoline powered cars near an open flame is entirely another sort of problem :-)

But, maybe the fire is inoperable these days because I didn't include the coal shed in the build.

Given this is the 21st century, and the neighbourhood the barn's located in, and the expensive cars inside, security cameras were called for. Well, at least signs indicating there were security cameras watching.

The barn was painted red to take it back to its roots. Green, being E. L. Moore's favourite colour, was used for the trim to give the kit's designer a tip of the hat.


I didn't have any plan to use this building, just construct it for purposes of mind soothing. However, while looking for a place to snap a beauty shot I absentmindedly plopped it down on the Way Out Layout where you see it in the drone view and instantly thought it belonged there. In fact I immediately had a mental image about how I wanted the large field between the road and the ocean to develop. All that from one careless placement of a building done in a carefree manner. I see lots of things to work on in the aerial view. Maybe they'll be next.

[Mid-morning update]: As seen outside the Red Car Barn early this morning:


[Mid-afternoon update]: A B&W in B&W:

Friday, February 2, 2024

Grilles kitbashed from Walthers Al's Victory Service

Late night rooftop concert at Grilles

I was chatting with Galen about this year's Walthers 2024 NMBRO. I was surprised to see that Walthers HO scale Al's Victory Service Gas Station was one of the base kits in the Kitbashing category. I was surprised because I had used that kit for a kitbash of sorts back in 2011. I'm not eligible to enter, but if you want to, um, "borrow" the idea, go right ahead :-) Here're the instructions. Good luck!

Looks like nobody was in any shape to drive home and wisely took the streetcar instead

Thursday, February 1, 2024

The Blasphemy of Bill Schopp

 In It Ain’t Railroading, But ... it’s a lot of fun, RMC, July 1960, Bill Schopp describes a model trains game he and a friend played. He starts his story with the outcome:

The Result


“…I hadn’t had so much fun with a model railroad since 1944.”


Then he goes on to outline the frame of mind you need to play the game:


The Precondition


“…you must not regard your trains, or at least the trains you run in this ‘game’ as sacred…”


Then, if you want the result, and are ok with the precondition, you’re ready to play:


Layout Schopp used for the game; RMC July '60
The Game


1. “…start a fast piece of motive power…out just ahead of…” a loco that is a lot slower.


2. Since “…the track, altho shaped like a water wings, is essentially a big oval,…” it “… was not too many laps before the faster…” loco “…got pretty close behind the slower...” loco.


3. “The idea then was, with the aid of the two passing sidings drawn, to run the faster engine around the slower one without stopping. You’d have to get just the right distance behind the slower one coming down the homestretch toward the entrance switch to the passing siding to be used. This sometimes entailed grabbing it with the hand and holding it, wheels spinning, until enough space had been opened up. There was stopping or holding sections along the track but not quite as many as drawn on the plan, so that unrailroadlike tricks had to be used.”


“Back about fifteen years before that I recall doing similar running wild with tinplate engines on various layouts we would set up.”


Any chance on the Way Out Layout?

The Summary


“What it requires is a layout with some chance of doing it, as well as a recognition on your part that all model trains are not sacred.”


If the letters-to-the-editor column is anything to go by, this piece of sacrilege appeared to pass without comment from RMC’s readers. Not so a much more seemingly benign Bill Schopp article called, Stalling at Switches, that appeared a year and a bit later in the Nov ’61 issue. In it Schopp discusses various approaches for fixing the common problem of having locos stall at switches - the summary is in the article's title :-) - that a friend of his was having on his layout. He lists 4 points that could alleviate the problem. The 4th deals with a finicky directional slide switch on the layout’s power pack as being a potential problem since these little switches had no centre off setting. He goes on to tell about an operational solution to get around the lack of a centre off position:


“This means [JDL: having no centre off that is] once you choose your direction with the slide switch, you start and stop the train by means of the speed control knob. Very realistic you may say, “just like real trains.” But also, I say, very annoying when switching. I much prefer to have toggle switches (short or bat-handled) with center-off position on my power packs. Then I can turn the speed control full-on [JDL: full-on is bolded in the text] and control direction and stopping of the train with the reverse switch. If the train is too fast, as rubber band diesels would be, I cut the speed control down to 3/4 or 1/2 speed and leave it there except for very finicky operations.”


Maybe it was the term full-on appearing in bold that caught John Allen’s eye, but the operational recommendation got him to send off a letter to the editor. In RMC’s January ’62 Safety Valve column he had this to say:


“It was a sorry surprise to read on page 43, November RMC, that a modeler of Bill Schopp’s skill and experience would say, and I quote, “… Then I can turn the speed control FULL ON and control direction with my reverse switch.” This must sound like blasphemy to each modeler who tries to run his trains in a realistic manner. An engineer would find himself quickly removed from the job if he followed this advice, on most of the model railroads with which I am acquainted.”


A couple of reflections on the above. With the benefit of looking back 60+ years, Mr. Allen failed to note that Schopp did say that if full-on was too much, then try a lower setting. I think the point Schopp was trying to make was to leave the throttle in a fixed position, but the bold text presentation of  ‘full-on’ undermined the message. More importantly though, these two excursions from orthodoxy further strengthening my thought that Schopp was model railroading’s amateur scientist. Any truly creative scientist, amateur or professional, is going to try some things now and then that might be fun and interesting but look odd to the establishment. I wonder if he played bongos?