Saturday, August 19, 2017

It was right in front of my eyes!

[Bob Hayden's 8-Ball Locomotive Works dead in the middle of the Thatcher's Inlet layout. Image sliced from the layout overview picture in the Feb. '72 issue of RMC.]

While reading through the Thatcher's Inlet series a bit more closely I realized another bit of E. L. Moore lore was positioned dead centre in the layout: Bob Hayden's 8-Ball Locomotive Works, aka, E. L. Moore's Dilly Manufacturing. Longtime readers may remember I wrote a lengthy analysis of the 8-Ball Loco Work's lineage. That building has a long and storied history that dates back to the Feb '51 issue of RMC to an article called Eight Ball Locomotive Works by Eric Brunger with plans by Bill Livingston. This building is never specifically called out in the Thatcher series, and highlights how the search for Moorian stuff doesn't always rely on just the written word.
[This image was sliced from a larger one in part 3 of the series that appeared in the Apr. '72 issue of RMC.]

4 comments:

  1. always please to see you continuing this series; thank you!

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    1. Thanks! I seems that whenever I start thinking it has run its course, something new pops up.

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  2. I think ELM kinda borrowed this design from either Livingston or Hayden. It's currently available from Bar Mills in 4 different scales. I'm not sure if it was a kit before that. Still, it showed up on a lot of layouts due to it's previous publications.... furthered still by ELM's. Regardless, it's an attractive little building!

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    1. You're right. In that previous post I outlined the whole complicated story. The original model was designed by Livingston and written up in an RMC Feb '51 article Brunger. ELM thought it had been published in MR and so used it, along with a redrawn plan, for his MR 1900s engine maintenance diorama. Hayden built a new version and published it in the Oct '70 issue of RMC. In my reading of old RMCs it's looking like the earliest a photo appeared was the June '50 issue. Livingston himself notes in a letter in the Feb '71 issue of RMC (twenty years after the building's initial publication) that it "really wasn't a model of anything" and that his first attempt at the building was made in 1949. Quite an interesting history.

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