Schopp talk during a pandemic

Take a look at the Mutter Museum exhibit on the 1918-19 influenza pandemic

Being at home just about all the time has meant a lot of time spent pondering obscure stuff and wandering through books and magazines I haven't cracked open in a long time, along with bouts of model building.

I've been thinking a bit about the work of Bill Schopp, the longtime contributor to Railroad Model Craftsman as well as other mid-20th century model railroad magazines. Well, maybe what I've been thinking about is the lack of readily available information about his work, which is odd given that it's claimed he wrote well over 1,000 articles on a wide range of model railroading related subjects. If true, that would likely make him the most prolific model railroad writer in the mid-20th century.

To me he's best known as the writer behind RMC's The Layout Doctor column. While I was researching E. L. Moore I must have encountered that column in just about every issue from the '50s and '60s. But, he did a lot more than track planning.

Although, from a cursory examination of his writing I can sort of see why he's not better known today. A lot of his work is counter to today's zeitgeist . Some might say, obsolesced, but for me the jury's still out on that. Look, he's a guy who doesn't even have a wikipedia entry let alone any biography or analysis of his work. There's only anecdotal reportage, and that alone is not a basis for any thoughtful assessment.

Here're a few possible reasons for his obscurity.

His trackplans have a lot of track. Spaghetti? Maybe. But, his Layout Doctor persona showed there was method to his madness.

He liked trolleys, and wrote a lot about trolleys and trolley layouts, which have more or less disappeared from the mainstream hobby in North America. Trolleys, trams, and streetcars, whatever you want to call them, have little 'traction' in our era, and it's likely to get worse as the pandemic corrodes ridership in the prototype world. Schopp's era saw massive streetcar line abandonment, but a lot of people had fond memories of trolley travel, and for a not insignificantly sized group that translated into hobby activity. That has almost all gone. And if there is diminishing interest in real world streetcars, there will likely be further diminishing interest in them in the model world. I suspect in a post-pandemic world anyone who can drive instead of taking any form of public transit will. The risk of exposure to the virus, whether real or imagined, may further eliminate any broad support for LRT or streetcars in the general public, and reduce ridership to only those who have no other options. This is all speculation on my part of course, and we'll see what the future holds, but interest in modelling electric public transit is tiny and likely isn't increasing.

He didn't lean toward finescale; his obituary in the June '74 issue of RMC had this to say: Bill Schopp was more concerned with putting ideas into action than he was in producing contest caliber models - I rather admire that putting ideas into action bit. He's also the inspiration of casualization :-)

Oh, and he had a little correspondence with E. L. Moore. One of the outcomes was the legendary Molasses Mine, and maybe he influenced one or two other of Mr. Moore's 'fantasy' projects. 

So, streetcars, 1,000+ articles, a desire to explore ideas, and as a bonus, a connection with E. L. Moore. It's catnip all the way down :-)

I've written a little about him, but given his 1,000+ article legacy, my writings don't even scratch the surface. Finding his articles is a bit more difficult than E. L. Moore's. First, I was influenced by Mr. Moore's late period work in the '70s when I was starting off in the hobby, so I had a sense of where to look and what to look for. Also, Mr. Moore focused on mainly one area, structures, and had a following of people who were familiar with at least some of his work from the '60s and '70s. There was a solid starting point.

Schopp's work seemed to appear mainly in Railroad Model Craftsman and its predecessor, The Model Craftsman, neither of which have digital archives. I own a fairly complete collection of RMCs from 1949 to 1990, with maybe only a dozen or so missing issues; however, I only have around a dozen issues of The Model Craftsman, and since his first publication was in the July '37 issue of MC, I'm missing most of his early work from 1937 to 1949. And I have no issues of Miniature Railroading, Toy Trains, or know which British magazines he published in. So, I'm missing a lot of information.  With E. L. Moore the main task seemed to be putting the pieces together,  with Bill Schopp, it would be in finding the pieces.

I don't know if I'll pursue an investigation, but I did take a look in the April '49 issue of RMC - the first issue of The Model Craftsman to be rebranded as Railroad Model Craftsman - to see if I could find a piece of the Bill Schopp story. Lucky for me there were two trolley pieces. In The Layout Doctor column of course.

Here's his addition of a trolley line to one of the first of the two trackplans that were under the microscope that month.

New trolley line added to the Weckler layout, MC Apr '49

The trolley line should add interest when the railroad is more or less complete. I have drawn it with four inch radius curves suitable say for a Birney safety car or short double trucker. If you want to economize still further, the old time four wheeled trolley made by the Beach Island Mfg Co. will take three inch radius curves.

It turns out that four-wheeler was also being offered in the The Car Barn advertising section dedicated to trolleys and traction equipment.

And here's the trolley line that he added to the second trackplan.

New trolley line added to the Tabacsko layout, MC Apr '49.

The trolley line runs from a loop hidden under a removable industry at Junction to another and larger loop around two blocks in the city. If a wye is built in the car line and the switches are sprung as shown by the arrows, a clockwise car can operate just on the loop, while a counterclockwise car could run out to the other loop.

They're both more-or-less dogbone plans, and they do appear to more-or-less serve to transport people from homes to work, but the layouts could no doubt be built without them. The trolley lines don't appear to be integral to the layouts' stories. I'm interested to see if there's a 'Doctored' layout in some issue where an added trolley line determines the success or failure of the of the overall plan's story.