Draft Introduction to E. L. Moore book

Bunn's Feed & Seed from an original E. L. Moore photo

I've been spending time on creating book chapters from E. L. Moore posts. My plan is to have a lot of short chapters instead of a few big ones with sub-sections as I don't want the book to appear dense or intimidating. Also, if one were to thumb through it I wanted there to appear new and interesting things every few pages.

The introduction though will be new material to try and set the context of the book. Here's a first draft:

In the summer of 1973 I was 13 years old and obsessed with making models of buildings. Specifically, buildings for a slot car layout a friend and I were building in his garage. Although the track was a sight to see, the buildings were merely enthusiastically slapped together shells of construction paper.

I was a regular loiter at a nearby smoke shop that had a fantastic selection of comic books and magazines. On one visit during that summer of miniature building frenzy, the August 1973 issue of Model Railroader magazine caught my eye, and after thumbing through it, bought it. Bought it because of an article on how to scratch build a 1/87 scale building called Bunn’s Feed & Seed by a guy named E. L. Moore. Soon after I got home I started to build a cardboard version of the barn half of the project in 1/32 scale for the slot car layout. The barn seemed like it would make a great place for storing cars, and for awhile it was.

From then on I’d regularly drop by the smoke shop and scan the model railroading magazines for miniature building projects. They were a regular feature of the magazines, so I became a regular buyer of whatever American and British magazines I could find. There appeared to be a steady stream of E. L. Moore penned projects in the American ones, and I always looked forward to them. Some of his projects I built; others I just read.

Time went on. The E. L. Moore inspired cardboard slot car barn was cannibalized for parts, and eventually trashed. I gave up making miniature buildings and model railroading. My thoughts turned to other things.

In the mid 1980s my interest in model railroading revived a little, and I learned that E. L. Moore was in the twilight of his model railroading career in the 1970s, and had died in 1979. I read a few of the model railroading magazines during that time, but that was the extent of the short lived revival.

I got back into model railroading in the 2000’s, and in the summer of 2013, 40 years after the summer of slot car track love, started to wonder about E. L. Moore, the guy who inadvertently got me started in model railroading. I had a blog and thought I should post whatever I found out about him. The first post was in August 2013. I found out a lot, and the search turned out to be quite an adventure. Although I spent many years in academia, nothing I did there compared to the challenge and excitement of finding out about E. L. Moore’s work and the model railroading world of his time. 

Most of the major E. L. Moore blog posts appeared from the second half of 2013 to the end of 2016, although a steady stream continued through to the end of 2019. Now it’s just a trickle.

In 2017 I tried to summarize what I had found in a Wikipedia post in its famous model railroaders section. However, internet information, be it presented in blogs, Wikipedia, or whatever, is ephemeral so I thought I would collect up the posts, edit them a little, and put them into a book. This would also give the information a bit better structure than that imposed by a blog’s diary-like format. 

So, here it is. A snapshot of the life and work of E. L. Moore, one of model railroading’s most influential and colourful characters.