E. L. Moore's Cal's Lumberyard: Getting Started

Sourced from the E. L. Moore Archives

In the E. L. Moore eBook I go on at length about how in August 1973 Bunn's Feed & Seed was the first Moorian project I built, and how that was followed by the construction of several new Moore projects that were published in 1974. What I didn't mention was a little literary time travelling I did in the summer of '73 back to April of that year.

Shortly after I had 'discovered' Bunn's I was off to Cedarbrae Public Library to look for other issues of Model Railroader. They had a few, and one was the April 1973 issue that contained E. L. Moore's Cal's Lumberyard. I photocopied the pages, and used them to make an attempt at building it. My build was crude, although it made up for deficiencies in craftsmanship with lots of youthful enthusiasm. I've wanted to revisit that build for a long time and give it another go. Now seems like as good a time as any given that I'm looking to get back in the model building groove and all.

But, after thinking about this project I'm not going to do a 'box stock' build (should that be 'page-by-page stock' build?). Time has gone on and I do have some other interests. I've decided on two major revisions:

1. Build it from styrene.

2. Tweak the design to enhance its 'play value'.

Yes, yes, the first is sacrilege I know, but I have a lot of styrene and styrene parts in my scrapbox I want to use up and nowhere near enough scrap balsa or scale lumber to make a dent in this project using wood castoffs. 

Sourced from E. L. Moore Archives

Ok, so onto tweaking the design.

One thing not a lot of people appreciate is that E. L. Moore had a strong interest in HO narrow gauge model railroading. I should do a post about his narrow gauge work, but for now, let's just consider Cal's Lumberyard. You can see it incorporates some N-gauge track so narrow gauge HO flat cars can haul boards out to the yard for storage. As well, there's a standard gauge siding for loading and unloading boxcars of lumber.

To make this building a little more fun for use on a micro layout that incorporates both HO scale standard and narrow gauges I thought it might be good not to dead end the tracks in the main building, but to let them extend out the front. This opens up more possibilities on how cars can come and go. It also allows for easier viewing of what's going on inside the building.

New facade for Cal's Lumberyard

After some fiddling at the drafting table, this is what I came up with. The basic sizes and shapes of the facades are the same as E. L. Moore used, but I've added a door on main building big enough to allow my Lands & Forests boxcar through, moved the smaller truck loading door to the left side, and eliminated the front wall cladding from the standard gauge boxcar unloading shed. 

In the drawing you can see I haven't precisely placed the other windows and doors. I plan to use leftover plastic castings from my scrapbox for those, and will do detailed placement when the time comes. For now, I'm just eyeballing the size and correct placement of those items to make sure there's roughly enough space for them. 

One other thing I'll note. If you extend the roof line of the main building you'll find that it intersects the outer corner of the office. Is this just a coincidence? I wonder if Moore originally had a different idea for the office's design? I only mention this as it suggests another interesting variation on this build.

Ok, so here's the main building's front wall in plastic.

A parts list:

- The facade is cut from an odd chunk of leftover Evergreen clapboard siding found in the scrapbox. I don't recall what product it is, but the sheet is 0.040" thick, and siding spacing is approximately 2.5 mm.

- All door opening trim is 0.020" x 0.040" strip.

- Each piece of vertical trim on the sides is made from 2 pieces of 0.040" square strip glued together. You could use 0.040" x 0.080", but I was using up leftovers.

- The window casting is an N-scale Tichy Train Group item I installed vertically instead of horizontally (that's why the right side of the window is thinner than the left). Again, I was using up leftovers. I'll blame the weird orientation on Cal :-)

-The foundation is a scrap piece of 0.040" sheet styrene cut to size.

I'm not sure how long this project will take. These days I'm not goal oriented, and am focusing on the experience of model making as I search for the elusive groove. I've got a few projects on the go and jump from one to another as the mood strikes. This means posts are likely to be more chaotic than usual.