From the Time Machine's Glovebox: Stories

The discussion Paul kicked off got me thinking that at this blog I've tried a few times to write a little bit of E. L. Moore inspired fiction to complement a construction post, or maybe just stand alone because I wanted to give it a go.

I think my first post on E. L. Moore as a storyteller was in the 25 Years at the Movies one. Buried deep in the digressions section I tried my hand at cooking up two stories as construction article set ups: Ma's County Winery and Al’s Airship Aerodrome. For your reading pleasure, here they are in their 2013 retro-glory.

Ma's County Winery

It all started with a phone call from Cousin Cal one Friday morning last May. I got to my office a little late that day as there was an unusually long line of people ordering complicated mocha-latte-grande-double/doubles with sprinkles and such at the café downstairs. All I wanted was black coffee to go. When I finally got to the counter the simplicity of my order confused them a bit and slowed down things even more. By the time I had gotten my drink and climbed the stairs to my office, I could hear the phone ringing inside. But luck was with me, and I was able to get the fiddly lock on the office door to spring and I made a dash to the phone before it stopped wailing.

I grabbed the receiver with my free hand and balanced my coffee with the other.

“You gotta get over here right now!” Cal was sounding flustered and forgetting the pleasantries of civilized conversation.

“Cal, you gotta work on your manners. Where’s the ‘hello’? Where’s the ‘how are you’?” While I was giving him the Dear Abby routine I put the steaming cup on my desk, cracked open the blinds to let some light in, and then proceeded to forget my own manners as I settled back in my chair, “Why are you calling?” 

I started to sip on my coffee while Cal gave me the particulars. He seemed to have calmed a bit, “Ma’s got it in her head that she’s gonna expand her old winery down in the County. She saw on the inter-tubes that the Chinese are out buying up every drop of wine in the world for the next few years. She figures now’s her chance to cash in big on her organic artisanal hipster wine. Expand production and all.”

Cal was getting wound up again. I jumped in and let him catch his breath, “That old winery needs to be demolished. It’ll never produce more than those few bottles she stashes away each winter. A new winery is what’s called for.” I started to muse a bit on this thing as the coffee kicked in, “She’s gotta have a rail siding for getting the stuff up to buyers; there’s gotta be some sort of olde-timey tasting room for the tourists; come to think of it, maybe it needs to be sorta olde-timey all round for the total tourist experience; probably needs some big vats for all that grape mash; well, there’s lots of things its gotta have.”

Cal knew what it meant when I started musing. He knew I was hooked, “Can you come down this weekend? She’s in a state and itching to get going right away.”

Ma with an itch is always trouble.

This seemed like an interesting diversion, and clients weren’t exactly beating my door down. “Yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow. Make sure some coffee’s brewing.”

I set to work drawing up some plans.

And that’s how I got to building this winery, and all you’ll need is in this shopping list,

{ list of materials }

That stuff should only set you back a couple of Twoonies and a Loonie. I kept costs low by making my own windows and doors, but feel free to substitute with your favourite castings. Shouldn’t take more than two weeks to build. That is of course if you don’t get too carried away watching tv on your iThingy while you’re working. That is unfortunately one of my failings. 

{ instructions, instructions, instructions }

I thought I’d give Ma a call to ask her to come out to the site and take a look at how things were progressing. As I pulled my mobile phone out of my coat pocket Cousin Cal started up with that cackling laugh of his.

“Cus, when are you going to get a phone that doesn’t look it fell off a Soviet trawler and washed ashore in the North Atlantic in ’75?”

I had to admit I listed a bit when I walked around with it in my pocket. “It works just fine and it’s cheap to boot,” was my lame attempt at a witty retort while I punched Ma’s number into my one-kilo wonder.

“O look, there’s another one over there!” Cal pointed to a stray brick left on the ground. He was laughing so hard he started to cough.

I hoped he gagged. Ma’s phone rang.

“What!” 

Ma was a little short on manners too.

“Do you want to come down to the field and have a look around? 

“Sure,” was her reply.

The line clicked. What Ma lacked conversationally, Cousin Cal compensated for with hilarity. He was having a good old time, holding the brick up to his ear and in between fits of laughter chattering away to unseen listeners on the other end of the baked clay network. 

But he sobered up as soon as he saw Ma’s ample silhouette striding across the field.

{ more instructions  and hopefully a conclusion to the story }

And in the same vein as the The Cannonball and Safety Powder Works, what could be more tempting than a building that houses a flying machine filled with hydrogen with old-fashioned, poorly maintained sparking railroad engines nearby – the plot possibilities are endless :-) Which brings me to,

Al’s Airship Aerodrome

I was renewing my liability insurance this afternoon and started to wonder if I had ever told you about the time I built the airship hanger.

Well, one day a couple of years back this Brazilian gentleman called me up from Paris – Paris, France that is – and asked if I could build him a hanger down in the County for an airship. I was glad to hear that my reputation for frugality was known in some quarters of the City of Light. This fellow – I never could pronounce his name properly, so we agreed I’d just call him Al, which it turns out he rather liked, and he’d call me Monsieur M, which Cousin Cal thought was hilarious, but I was partial to the sound of it, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Al was a ‘Personal Blimp’ builder.  I hadn’t heard of such an occupation, but I figured there are personal computers, personal trainers, even personal pan pizzas, so why not personal blimps. 

Anyway, he was coming over to the County for a few months to get this financier-turned-gentleman-farmer fitted out with a personal blimp, and all the things needed to own and operate one. That included a hanger to park it in. That’s where I came in. You might ask, why was a railroad man like myself called up for this project? Like I said, there’s frugality, but it did involve a considerable amount of railroad gear.

For one thing, there’s the doors. A blimp, even a personal-sized one, is mighty big. The doors on the garage needed to park this beast are 50 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Now, Al is one smart cookie and on the hanger his guys built in Monaco, he figured out how to make the doors ride on rails so that even a 10-year-old kid could push them open. Given that Cousin Cal is the spittin’ image of the ‘before’ guy in those Charles Atlas ads, this was just his speed. 

But, as things turned out, it wasn’t Cousin Cal’s lack of muscle power that tripped up this project, it was his lack of brain power. A blimp garage is more-or-less one gigantic loco shed, so the other railroad thing you need, is some track for hauling in blimp parts, and for bringin’ in helium tanks if hydrogen just won’t do. Al’s one of those renegades who swears by hydrogen for these things – none of that expensive helium for him. No sir. He makes it – hydrogen that is – himself right there in the shed. According to Al, hydrogen is like a woman –if they are treated with care and respect, then all will be well. Unfortunately for him he never met Cousin Cal and his ancient loco. Track, an old sparking loco, lots of hydrogen nearby: you can see where this is going. Well, more on this later. Here’s what you’ll need to build a blimp aerodrome to service the more responsible personal airship aficionados on your pike...

Those two stories never did accompany a model building project - but they still could, I'm hopeful for the future :-) - but this one for 2011's Mr. Buschel's Barrel and Marble Works did (which is based on an actual building even though the story is a complete fabrication):

Mr. Buschel's Barrel and Marble Works

One day last summer Debra and I drove down to Prince Edward County to have dinner at Bob’s Truffle Hut. Her friends had been telling her great things about the place, so we went to see for ourselves. What they didn’t tell us was there was this great model railroad-able feed mill right behind the Hut. Debra went in and got us a table and I wandered over to the building to take a look before the sun went down.

Turns out it wasn’t a mill anymore, but a recyclery, barrel maker and marble works that had taken up residence in the old building. Luckily the owner’s grandson was on the loading dock to tell me some history about the place.

Apparently granddad bought the abandoned mill in the early ‘70s to house his barrel making business, He was a big fan of Evel Knievel and thought that Mr. Knievel’s exploits would inspire an upsurge in motorcycle barrel jumping, and that meant there’d be a big demand for barrels. Well, with that and the new wineries springing up in the County, it looked like blue skies ahead for the barrel biz.

The barrels-for-cycle- jumping thing never panned out, but barrels for wine, or repurposed for furniture and other odd things provided some steady income over the years. Granddad rented out the west wing to a marble artisan in the late ‘90s, and a deal with the County saw the recyclery tacked on just a few years ago. The sun was getting low, so I snapped a few pictures and popped into the Hut before the truffles got cold.

The prototype mill is big. Too big for my 6 foot by 5 foot model railroad, so building a model of it was an exercise in selective compression. That is, picking out the parts I liked, and squeezing the dimensions down to something that was just the right size for the railroad, all the while trying to maintain the vibe of the structure that attracted me to it in the first place.

Also, I didn’t want to turn this into an exercise in overly specialized construction methods and micro-detailing, but something that could be built with fairly commonplace model railroading building materials, and only about 2 weeks of concentrated work.

Some styrene sheets, Campbell scale corrugated metal siding, window and door castings from Tichy Train Group, plus a few scraps of styrene tubing and balsa are just about all you’ll need materials wise. For tools, the standard X-acto knife, scale, angle, thick super glue, pen, pencil, and a tube of styrene glue will do it. Also, you’ll need some bottles of acrylic paints, a few brushes, and some water for clean-up, but no sprays or air-brushes.

Costs? Well, if you were actually able to just buy the exact amount of materials used in this project, you could build it for about $20 to $30. Turns out, if you don’t already have a small stash of materials leftover from other projects, you’ll need to buy the materials in the pre-packaged amounts they’re commonly sold in, so it’s going to cost more – around $30 to $40 - but you’re going to have leftovers for other projects. Which is probably a good thing, because once you have a small stash of materials there’s less of a hurdle when you start new projects. I’ll discuss how to save some cash as we go through the building process.

Now, a bit of a disclaimer: I was way off on the concentrated work bit – the elapsed time for the build was roughly 6 months of only working an hour here and ten-minutes there and doing other projects in between and so on. I’m sure you’re not as lazy or disorganized as I am!

…. and on with show.

And speaking of a show. I've been hooked on stories all my life, and looking back it's easily understandable that I was hooked on Jim Croce songs. I bought all the vinyl, and memorized all the lyrics to all the songs - which I can still call up at will, so you don't want to be in the car with me if one comes on the radio :-) Here's the one with my namesake, even though it doesn't turn out too well for him.