Fun With The Hobby -- I

One of the blogs I follow is 30 Squares of Ontario. One of his favorite topics is E.L.Moore, a prolific model railroad author who had a 25-year career writing for Model Trains, Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman, and Railroad Modeler between 1955 and 1980, the year he passed away. Many of his articles were followed by kit manufacturers who brought out versions of his buildings in wood and plastic, from makers like Durango Press and AHM. (Walthers has recently reissued some of the AHM moldings.)

For a long time, I thought he was basically overexposed (he was), and, often, hokey (sometimes, but not as often as I thought). J.D.Lowe, the blogger behind 30 Squares, has had access to Moore's correspondence and some of Moore's original structures preserved in private collections and has done quite a bit to put together a bibliography of all Moore's published articles. It's been enlightening to go back and get a different picture of Moore from Lowe's blog.

Moore was something like 10 years older than John Allen, who's always been one of my inspirations, but he didn't begin publishing until 10 years after Allen got started. But both represent a lot of what the hobby was about in the 1950s and 60s, when I got started in it as a kid. At its worst, it was the "cute caricature" side of the hobby, but as I look back on it with more perspective, the hobby was part of the culture, and railroad cuteness had been fostered in Hollywood from the time of Union Pacific, Denver and Rio Grande, The Harvey Girls, and A Ticket To Tomahawk.

But not long ago, I was looking at the Bachmann retooled 1860s-70s 4-4-0 locomotives and thinking they might be worth playing around with. That in turn reminded me of a lesser-known E.L.Moore article, "Union Pacific Windmill" in the September 1962 MR. (Now that MR has made its digital archive available at a pretty reasonable price, it's easy to find this.) I won't use anything from the article, since you can find it at MR's site, but here's a shot of the prototype Moore followed:

I was 14 in September 1962 and was inspired to build this immediately. I used balsa, card stock, and acetate just like Moore did, and I ran it with an electric fan. I was always interested in early prototypes, but the windmill is as far as I got at the time. My family moved less than a year later, and I don't know what happened to the windmill. I think I'm going to redo it now that I've found the Moore article again -- as Moore said, it's a 3-evening project. The water tank with enclosed base looks tempting, too.

One of the Bachmann 4-4-0s is lettered for UP 119, one of the Promontory locos. But here's a photo of UP 122, clearly of the same type:

This takes me back to the idea of having fun with the hobby. I'll have more to say on this.