E. L. Moore's "Great Handcar Get Away"

From the old handcar or section shed evolved the garage that housed the jalopy of later days. The garage has given way to the carport, but the old section house continues in much the same form as it was fifty years ago. The handcar of those days served a multitude of purposes aside from its regular workaday routine. I've always vividly remembered the story told in our family about the time the handcar was used as the getaway vehicle by masked robbers who held up my father in the middle of the night at gunpoint and forced him to open the nearby section shed and the following day the abandoned handcar was found a dozen miles down the line.

That story was the opening paragraph to E. L. Moore's manuscript called, Housing Your Handcar, that was submitted to Model Railroader on 22 August 1963. A somewhat edited version appeared in Handcar and its shed without the above story in the February 1964 issue. I built the handcar shed a couple of years ago in one of the first posts in the E. L. Moore in the 21st century series.