E. L. Moore: A 21st Century French Connection

Snipped from Voie Libre International #82, pg 44

Over the summer I bought a few back issues of Voie Libre International that were on super-sale. On the weekend I was re-reading #82 (April-May-June 2015), and came across a rather intriguing article called Egger-Bahn's Little Iron Horse by François Robein. It tells the story of Egger-Bahn's release of an American-style wild west narrow gauge train in 1966. 

Two things jumped out at me. First, it mentions that Preiser released some Cowboy and Indian figures in their '67-'68 catalogue, apparently based on the success of the Egger-Bahn trains. Naturally, this sent me back to E. L. Moore's rejected story, Shades of Buffalo Bill, that he submitted to Model Railroader in July '68. In the manuscript Mr. Moore mentions he used Preiser figures in his diorama, so, an interesting connection*. And two, in a few scenes M. Robein staged for the article, he used the hardware store version of E. L. Moore's W. E. Snatchem plastic kit that I built last year, and, as you can see in the photo I snipped from a larger one, we both used the same colours. The lineage of the model goes un-noted, but that's what I'm here for :-) Voie Libre International continues to surprise and delight.

*If you take a look at the Preiser tepees in M. Robein's article you can see they are quite similar to those in Mr. Moore's diorama - they're in the bottom right corner of the photo. In fact, in Mr. Moore's manuscript he explains how to make your own tepees that look like Preiser's. I wonder if E. L. Moore got the idea for his wild west show from studying that Preiser catalogue?