Bus stop to summer

Winter is blasting away outside, but luckily I know where to catch a bus back to summer. For mental health reasons, something like this scene is going to have to appear on the layout :-)

E. L. Moore in the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette

Paul let me know that there was an article called E. L. Moore and the Village Smithy by Charlie Getz in the Jan / Feb 2023 issue of the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette. I dropped by my local hobby shop and picked up a copy to see what it was about. 

"To my surprise, Wikipedia has published a lengthy biography of E. L. Moore including a complete chronological index of his published articles in RMC, Model Railroader (MR) and Model Trains magazines, and even his unpublished manuscripts." 

Long time readers here may recall that the information in Wikipedia was contributed from information posted here - see my license at the end of the Wikipedia article. A lot of that information was used in the Gazette article as Charlie Getz notes. I'm glad to see that the Wikipedia article has gotten some airplay and is helping to keep E. L. Moore's legacy alive. 

And speaking of ELM's legacy, the E. L. Moore eBook is in final production and my plan is to release it sometime in March. And Charlie Getz's article is great and he's done an excellent job on the village smithy kit. And for a little more information on the kit take a look here and here. And I need some more coffee :-)

A TTC Surfin' School Bus?

Centre: Hot Wheels Surfin' School Bus. A long lost member of the TTC family?

Quite by accident I stumbled across the Hot Wheels Surfin' School Bus in what looked like a paint scheme highly reminiscent of the one used by the TTC in years gone by. I found one for sale on eBay for a reasonable price and immediately pushed the buy button. It came in an unopened blister pack, so purists might feel lightheaded as I note that I ripped it open and staged a family portrait. If I can figure out how to remove the factory stickers without damaging the paint, I'll replace them with some suitable TTC decals. It actually won't look too bad size and shape wise on the layout. It'll be some sort of hot rodded ride to the beach owned by an addled TTC fan.

Later. Tell the teacher we're surfin'.

Look up, look way up

Last week I glued up 16 poles for supporting the overhead wire. These particular ones are sized to span both tracks on the straight sections of the road. I'll need another bunch whose horizontal arms can reach over both tracks on corners where the track spacing is somewhat wider.

I should note that these are decorative and not designed to carry current to the model streetcars. The vertical poles are cut from bamboo skewers, and the horizontal arms are 3/32" square section basswood. A straight pin, with its head snipped off, coated with superglue is used to hold the arm to the vertical post. A small triangular gusset cut from 0.020" styrene was glued into the pole/arm joint for additional strength. To finish off, a wire was strung between the end of the arm and the pole. and held in place with glue. For connecting the overhead wiring to the arms I have some pins and Japanese seed beads for making the wire hangers, but I still need to figure out how to attach them - there'll be some fun playtime ahead on that task :-)

A micro-layout based on E. L. Moore's Bott's Cotton Gin

David Fugere's rendition of Bott's Cotton Gin (Photos courtesy David Fugere)

Paul alerted me to this excellent model of E. L. Moore's Bott's Cotton Gin, a project that appeared in the Sept '78 issue of Model Railroader, by David Fugere. It's nice how he has incorporated it in a micro-layout - looks like it's HO-9.

Photo courtesy David Fugere

Bott's was one of E. L. Moore's last published projects, and was his second last to appear in MR. 

In the late fall of 1975 ELM had to get cataract surgery, and in his usual colourful style mentioned to Russ Larsen in a letter dated 19 Oct '75 that it was coming up:

Was gonna have the other eye castrated, but now I find they gotta search around among my entrails to find a missing bolt or link or something. This has been the year of one damned thing or another but hell, 1976 is just around the corner. 

In Jan '76 ELM let Larsen know his eye surgery went fine and he was getting together some prototype photographs on which Bott's would be based. ELM submitted the Bott's article to MR in July '76 with this accompanying letter:

July 22, 1976

Russ Larsen, Editor

Model Railroader,

1027 N. 7th St.,

Milwaukee, Wisc.

Yup, like usual your letter got here the day I mailed mine . . . .

Well, here it is, Bott’s Cotton Gin, 2800 words, two sheets of drawings and three photographs.

Friday is my grocery shopping day, a cab to the grocery and then a fella who runs an off side taxi service brings me home and carries up my groceries . . . and also runs me by the post office branch. Everything works out just fine. Walk about four blocks in the morning using a plain old stick cane and later go out in the back yard to sit to keep my cats company . . . beats cleaning out the bathtub, if you get the connection. My two cats are so lazy they don’t want to go out unless I go out with them.

Keep up the good work . . . 

E. L. Moore

In 1976 ELM was 78 years old. It's good to hear that he was still building models after cataract surgery, getting around his neighbourhood, and apparently using the Uber of his day :-)

---

P.S.: David, you should consider submitting a story to The Micro Model Railway Dispatch about your layout. And thanks for allowing me to post your photos!

Cover story in Feb '23 issue of The Interchange

I collected up the posts I made about my uncle's investigation into an explosion at a Calgary Flour Mill in 1944 and submitted it as a story for the Ottawa Valley Associated Railroaders' newsletter. They published it as the lead story in the February 2023 issue.

It was a good exercise as it gave me the opportunity to stitch together all the loose ends in those posts into a complete story. I also hope it will encourage people to write up any old stories they have before they're lost to time.

Balloons and blimps and other floaty things

That's a rotor on the bottom - it better not flap :-)

Back in the 1980s, in the early part of my working life, I did a brief stint as an aeronautical engineer; I played the role of an ersatz blimp engineer on a few projects. I was enamoured with blimp-like flying machines, and sized and drew and pondered many odd configurations outside my day job. Seeing balloons and blimps in the news causing a national security incident so deep into the 21st century seems quite odd to me after all these years. I had come to dismiss blimpy things as impractical after my '80s inoculation. But, who knows what's going on out there. Maybe there are very advanced lighter-than-air flying machines flying all over the place. It's not like I'm in the loop these days. 

So, in the spirit of lighter-than-air weirdness, maybe induced by standing too close to the helium cylinders decades ago, here are a few sketches of airship hallucinations dug up from my files.

The vibration in those crazy long arms would be wild 

The idea of attaching rotors to blimps was a thing back then. It was thought that the combination of one or more rotors, say from a helicopter or V-22 Osprey, attached to an envelope filled with helium, maybe via a frame or stuck right on the envelope, might produce a vehicle capable of great lift. 

Control was an issue. It's fairly easy to make a spherical envelope point any way you want, but, wow, that sphere has a lot of drag when you need to push it in the direction you want to go.

Ok, well, maybe some sort of triangular base truss is the way to attach those rotors. But still, we're talking a massive structure. Quad-rotor drones weren't a thing then, so maybe with the advances brought about by that technology means these kinds of hybrids aren't completely impossible,

Maybe the sphere isn't the way to go for an envelope, even though it does give the most volume for the least surface area. Maybe a Homer Simpson inspired donut is the ticket; however, the one shown over there is far too small to provide the lift needed. It does though give a place for a central lifting rotor. 

I thought it would be great to have a personal sized airship. There were personal pan pizzas and personal computers, so why not. If it just wasn't for those pesky winds, expensive helium, and so on and so on.....

Try as I might I kept making drawings of design variations years later. All impractical, but nevertheless fun to speculate. I'm still of the opinion that it might be possible to build HO scale airships that fly. My initial attempts weren't very successful, but I think a better modeller than me might be able to make them work. It would certainly add some wildness to a layout. 

On this one the rotors would need to be able to tilt.

This one always struck me as looking rather prissy. Again, those rotors need to tilt.

Maybe ducted fans instead of rotors is the way to go? They too probably needed to be able to tilt. I think this one might swing too much like a pendulum when in flight. 

A somewhat cruder, but likely more practically buildable variation that maybe could be made in HO scale, if not O, although it would be rather large in that scale.

I think it might be possible to build one of these underslung rotor jobs with a streamlined envelope, but the rotor's motion no doubt could cause trouble. You wouldn't want a gust to cause it to slice into the envelope. 

Like everyone else I heard reports that the spy balloon was equipped with propellers and flaps that allowed it some degree of maneuverability. And I heard other reports that said, no, no, none of that. Well, I'm curious to hear what the postmortem on the shot down one has to say, if the report ever sees the light of day. 

The machines in all my little sketches have rotors, and some have flaps of various sorts, but these vehicles aren't designed for high altitudes like 65k+ ft. I'm wondering if those balloons use some sort of strato-sailing technology? Maybe one day we'll find out.

That rotor looks way too close

This one and the previous have a keel that runs along the bottom of the hull to attach all the necessary flight equipment.

In this one the keel even has a whale-tail attached. I don't know how effective it would be for control, and the vertical fin looks too small. Hind sight is 20/20.

Well, I'm keeping my eyes to the skies. If some big, honking blimp with an equally big rotor attached crashes in my backyard, you'll hear it here first :-)

Cue the X-Files music.

Measuring up for overhead wire support poles

I finished laying down the static grass along the perimeter where the poles for the overhead wire will go. I'm keen on making those poles so I thought I'd do some measuring to begin figuring out their dimensions.

The first thing was to line up the fleet on the track to estimate how high the wire needs to be above the road. It's looking like 65mm.

All three of those cars have been fitted with Kato N-scale drive units and are in varying states of operability. Over on the right is the Hong Kong tram, centre is the Jigger (pulled from the paint shop for this photo), and on the left is the my secret Siku Bombardier tram conversion (I'll do a full post on it sometime in the future; it sort of runs, but still needs a lot more work) I started last fall before going whole hog on the ELM book .

Well, I need to get back to inserting commas.

The model buildings of Mylyn Nguyen

Galen brought this video to my attention. It does strike me as being in the long and honourable tradition of folk art model buildings, although I think she is a professional artist. Well, look, forget about classification and just enjoy her art.

The Insectary is a many windowed box

Yesterday I posted a photo of the Insectary's front and right side walls. Over there on the left is the Insectary's other long wall. It too is lined with windows, but there's no door. 

Over on the right is the back wall; only 3 windows on this end. So, here's a count of the window castings needed for each wall:

Right: 9 ( + 1 door)

Left: 10

Front: 3

Back: 3

Total: 25

With 25 windows there's no way I'd try and build this structure with an old school window making method. I need to rummage through Tichy's and see if they have a suitable casting.

Beginning scenery

For little mental breaks while I finish up the E. L. Moore book I like to putter with scenery on the experimental farm layout.

I'm currently putting down the base layer of green grass beside the track. It's where the poles for the overhead wiring will be installed. 

Down at the far end you'll see Vicki's Veggies. It's at the farm's road edge so passersby can pick up some farm fresh veg on their way home. There's going to be a tomato patch beside it. Some Woodland Scenic's soil flocking has been glued down to get it started.

If all goes well there'll be a model of the Photo Equatorial building near the inside loop, and an 'insectary' somewhere inside the farm's grounds.

The Insectary: A classic E. L. Moore style subject?

Yeap, the insectary was an actual building at the Central Experimental Farm. Apparently during WWI there was a lot of concern about insect pests chomping away on crops, so research was begun to see what could be done. One of the buildings used to support that work was the insectary. The building still stands today, although I think it's being put to some other use.

First round of painting

It took a few days of part time work, but I finished painting the first layer of colour on the farm's internal road with Revell Aquacolor Stone Grey. The grounds the road surrounds were given a rough wash of raw umber.

That line down the centre of the farm's grounds is an internal walking path. It's made from fine sand white glued to the foam. 

Those white rectangles on either side of the inner loop are to be passenger waiting areas for streetcars. They're cut from 0.060" styrene sheet. That white strip over by the farm boundary with the main road is a sidewalk. It's also made from 0.060" styrene. This paint work is a little tedious, but after every session I'm glad to see more and more of the farm coming to life.