The E.L.Moore Windmill -- I

As I said earlier this week, new Bachmann retooled 4-4-0s and the MR Digital Archive combined to bring back my interest in E.L.Moore's Union Pacific windmill article, which I followed to build a model of my own in 1962. One issue in 1962 was that, although this was a fascinating project, I didn't have any real use for it on my then-layout, and I just kept it in my room and let it turn from the wind out of my electric fan.

Here's the current status:

This is very much in the spirit of E.L.Moore, using leftover stuff from around the house. The main timbers are barbeque-fireplace matches, which I've found various uses for in modeling, mainly bracing behind sheetwood for structures and logging skids up to now, but they work OK for this project as well. I have some cardstock and a school compass that I can use for the wheel when the time comes -- I will just need to run out for some craft store beads to use for spacers.

One thing that began to grow in my mind was whether I could actually put it on my layout. It doesn't look like Moore actually used it on his, from the photos at 30 Squares. It's unusual and sort of era-specific, the sort of thing that Allen McClelland says you should not do, because then you have to justify things to visitors -- but then, as I pointed out in my last post, John Allen got away with a lot himself, and if visitors don't like my layout, they don't have to visit.

So I began to think about a spot I'd already prepared for a water tank on my dual-gauge branch:

It's the flat white area to the left of the general store. I was originally going to put a D&RGW style water tank here, but I have another place where I can use that. With a little finagling, I can fit the windmill in (the catenary line below it will be hidden behind scenery):

I'll need to trim the base very closely, but it's doable. I think I will also E.L.Moore-ize an enclosed base for an old Revell plastic water tank. This will be in the spirit of UP versions, but it'll be small enough to fit beside the windmill. Here's another photo of a UP windmill I found on the web, this one at Laramie:

The proportions suggest this is the one Moore followed for his model.

Fun With The Hobby -- II

The one hobby figure I've always admired above all others is John Allen. Among other things, he broke a lot of the ordinary "rules" that people think govern the hobby with his Gorre and Daphetid layout. Linn Westcott said in his biography of John Allen that there were actually "two G&Ds", the one he operated with a group of regular friends and the one that was depicted in places like the ads he did for Varney and PFM.

Normally, for instance, he didn't run diesels, and the PFM O-8 on the upper track wasn't on the G&D roster. Still, when I first saw this ad in an MR sometime in the late 1950s, it inspired me, and I have an area on my layout now that looks something like this part of the G&D.

Allen was paid something by PFM for this shot, but it was probably a barter deal. PFM probably just gave him brass locos for this ad and other shots for their catalogs. By the early 1950s, according to Westcott, Allen's brother had invested their inheritance well enough that he could quit his photography business and spend full time on modeling. (Allen was 40 at the time.)

This means that, although he was probably very happy to get the PFM locos and rework them for his layout (he was a notorious tightwad), he really wasn't doing the ad shoots for the money. This ad appeared on the back cover of the November 1952 MR.

It's another diesel-powered streamliner of the sort that you wouldn't ordinarily see in a G&D operating session. There's also a Varney NW-2 with a bay window caboose closer to the camera. But even outside the ads, Allen photographed things that broke the rules of conventional expectations:

If he didn't really need the money, he wasn't departing from his concept of the G&D for the ads -- and there were plenty of photos not done for ads that went outside the concept of a "canonical" G&D. He was happily publishing a view of his model railroad that stressed visual interest and a general sense of fun. In this respect, I don't think there were actually two G&Ds. The one in the Varney and PFM ads certainly sticks in our memories, and it's the one I've found most inspiring.

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.

ScaleTrains Trinity Crude Oil Tank Car

I got the ScaleTrains newsletter (I'm especially interested in the Big Blow turbine. which appears in the Emery Gulash UP Odyssey DVDs), and they now have their Operator series Trinity 31,000 gallon crude oil tank cars in stock. This looks to be a modern tank car with a price about as low as we'll get for this kind of thing, at least outside of what you can find at swap meets.

This is a really modern prototype. I looked at the number series available and then went to the hundreds of tank car photos I have in my files -- especially in the last six years or so, once I got a digital camera, I've shot lots of tank car photos, especially at Pepper Avenue in West Colton. I have very, very few photos of this style of car. The ones I've gotten are all from a single cut of VMSX cars, but ScaleTrains has a number of other reporting marks.

It's the protective end shields, hard to see on an all-black car from this angle, that makes them unique. The shield is easier to see on the end of the car to the left, which is from the same series. This car must be brand new in this shot, taken in November 2013.

I plan an expedition to a hobby shop tomorrow. If they have them in stock, I won't have much choice, will I?

The Woods Line -- III

Here is the skid shack sandhouse with a little more scenery brought up around it:

But then I pulled out a Thomas Yorke loco oil facility kit that had been hiding in my stash for 30 years at least. I assembled it and installed it in what looked like a likely spot:

About the closest prototype area where I can find inspiration for this kind of scene is the Sierra Railroad roundhouse and museum area in Jamestown, CA, which is still the best part of a day's drive. But here's a similar setup, attached directly to a tank car:

I also added some freight car wheels to the scenery next to the enginehouse:

The biggest thing I still need to do is cover the switch machine with some sort of shed. I'm thinking about this. Here are some other shots from Jamestown that might help with inspiration:

I'll probably let this simmer and move to another project area.

The Woods Line -- II

Here is the log reload area as it looked before I began any work on it:

I then began blocking it up with pieces of foam and Sculptamold filler:

I shimmed the track up to level with a piece of corrugated cardboard:

Then I spiked in some individual ties and linked the rail from the trestle to a piece of code 70 flex track:

And finally ran in a loco to test the track:

Then I turned to the area near the engine house where I planned to install a skid shack-style sandhouse I scratchbuilt from a logging plan book:

I have another skid shack I built from a Builders in Scale kit:

The one I scratchbuilt is similar but bigger, and I added posts so I could level it against the hillside:

Next step will be to dirt the sandhouse in and bring more vegetation into the area.