Scenes from the Alta Vista Transit Commission: An unworkable, unfinished, unlamented model railway, 2017 - 2021

Last of a series....I think.

Opening Soon! Thé Noir at its new location

Paparazzi mob Thé Noir's big location reveal

After publishing the LOL video and thinking about Michael's comments I figured I should note that Thé Noir* has a place of honour on the current layout. Instead of being on a city street, it's now located on Ocean View Lane, with a view of the ocean :-) And, it's right beside the natural history museum. Prime real estate indeed. There is a problem though: no on-street parking. Walk-in and streetcar accessible only.  Stay tuned for the Grand Re-Opening!

*Note: Improvements include straightening the sign!

Tom Daniel on his Bad Water Western layout

Over the weekend Vince contacted Tom Daniel with some questions about his Bad Water Western layout. Mr. Daniel proved once again to be a great guy and graciously answered Vince's questions about the layout. Here's an edited summary (Tom Daniel's comments are in "Courier" as is the convention here):

Tom Daniel's Bad Water Western module "won First Place" at the 1973 MRIA meet.

"At that same contest, John Olson also entered his HOn3 module which also won First Place in the 'Narrow Gauge" category. John and I became lifelong friends - and he - being an accomplished model photographer - among all his other talents - John became the official 'company' photographer for my Bad Water Western RR ..."

"There is NO actual operating BWW layout - rather, a series of modules, all still works in progress. The original Module Contest winner was unfortunately destroyed many years ago."

"Other than one or two shots in MR in years past; and the BWW images you saw via Max Models, there has been no definitive photo and text story about how the BWW came into being in 1949."

"Thanks for your interest in the Bad Water Western."

I'd like to thank Tom Daniel and Vince for giving their time to help clarify this interesting piece of model railroading history.

Scenes from a lost model railway: The Lost Ocean Line, 2011 - 2017

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." - Albert Camus

Tom Daniel's Bad Water Western at Max's Models

Vince contacted Tom Daniel about the Bad Water Western. Tom Daniel graciously replied and said there was a video about it at Max's Models. Amazing stuff!

New beginnings: Thaddeus Lowe's personal trolley in S-9

An S-scale, 9mm beginning for a trolley inspired by Thaddeus Lowe's. It's built on a Kato 11-108 drive unit.

The last two months I've been working on a diorama for entry in this Loco-Revue contest. It was submitted last week and graciously accepted, so now I'm back to normal operations :-)

The thing that surprised me about the diorama project was how fast I completed it and the enthusiasm I brought to the work. I started from zero on 26 February and finished on or around 19 April - and that included a 10 day excursion to Texas in the middle where no hobby work occurred. The project involved making 3 little dioramas, designing and scratchbuilding a building, scenicking, and modifying and detailing a locomotive, as well as shooting lots of photos, two videos, and packaging them for submission. I had a great time. The best in a long while. Most of my projects take ages and drag on. There's a message or two in there for me.

I think one of the messages is that I need to park most of my existing projects for a bit and focus on fun - well, let's say getting satisfaction from building, not 'fun' as the popular media defines it. I was doing many projects out of a feeling they needed to be done. Forget that. This summer could simply be a random walk looking for hobby fun, as well as enjoying any good weather that comes along of course.

I may have finally figured out how to build a little layout inspired by the Mt. Lowe railway. First though I need a model - in this case a casualized model - of Thaddeus Lowe's personal trolley that he used to scoot around his railway. I've made a start and I'll continue until the fun runs out.

Story Miles

Story Miles: The imagined distance between two locations on a layout as defined in the layout's backstory.  

Usage: The island test facility was 25 story miles from the locomotive factory.

Source: The phrase 'story miles' was first spotted in a photo caption associated with John Olson's article, The Mescal Lines RR, that appeared in the January 1984 issue of Model Railroader:

"Saline Valley is a desert water stop. It's just above the scene in photo 2 [JDL: Above an area of "red desert" scenery shown in photo 2] even though it is some 25 "story" miles further north, a good example of how John separates scenes with a camera-like eye."

As the editor hints at, Olson makes the Saline Valley seem farther away from its layout neighbours than it actually is by carefully orchestrated scenic transitions.

Story miles are not scale miles.

from The Dictionary of Non-Existent Model Railroad Terms, 2nd ed., 1999.

Tom Daniel, Designer of Laser Cut Structure Kits

Ad snippet for a Tom Daniel designed Wood Freight Depot; MR Jan '99

While wandering around looking for some notes on Tom Daniel's Bad Water Western layout I ran across this interview with him in the February 2000 issue of Scale Auto Enthusiast. Near the end of the article he mentions what he was up to circa 2000 or so:

""I've done a lot of different designs since," Daniel says. A series of model-railroad scenery backdrops was among them. Daniel, an avid model railroader, designed those for his own company, HO West. Model railroad giant Wm. K. Walthers later purchased those designs, and continue to produce them under the Instant Horizons name. Daniel also designed HO scale buildings for Model Expo, and did some design work for Bburango."

This post's lead image is an ad for one of those HO scale structures that Model Expo ran in the January and February 1999 issues of Model Railroader. Regarding the featured Wood Freight Depot, the ad copy has this to say:

"New design by Tom Daniel is based on his boyhood memories of America during World War II. Although the Wood Freight Depot does not replicate a specific prototype, it combines many realistic elements for an authentic railroad atmosphere."

That's sort of an interesting tie in back to Tom Daniel's recollection of working in old boxcars from that era that he recounted in his May '72 RM article, An Inside Look at Boxcar Details.

I'll let the completist in me wrap up this post. There appear to be ads for Tom Daniel designed structures in these issues of Model Railroader: Mar '96, July '98, Nov '98, Jan '99, Feb '99, Mar '99, Nov '99, Dec '99, and Mar 2000. The upshot is his designs had been around for awhile before the Scale Auto Enthusiast article was published.

The search continues.

No sign of the Bad Water Western RR

Ad for 1973 MRIA show

I looked through all the 1974 issues of Railroad Modeler looking for other stories and photos about Tom Daniel's Bad Water Western RR layout as promised in the January issue but found none. 

Surprisingly I did find a mention of it in an article John Olson wrote that introduced his Mescal Lines layout to readers of Model Railroader's January 1984 issue - the famous 50th anniversary of MR issue. In the section on the railroad's background story he notes that:

"We [JDL: 'We' as in the Mescal Lines RR] connect the eastern Sierra with such serious and hardworking slim-gauge roads as the Bad Water Western of Tom Daniel (in Western Arizona), the Pelican Bay Ry. & Navigation Co. of Paul Scoles (who models the Northern California sea coast) and, of course, the Fiddletown & Copperopolis Ry. of those great old Carl Fallberg cartoons (we're still looking for it on the map!)."

Maybe I shouldn't be too surprised by the mention as John Olson also had a module on display at the 1973 MRIA show. Olson and Daniel likely have a connection that goes way back.

I'll have to see if Railroad Model Craftsman has anything to say about the 1973 MRIA show. Stay tuned!

Tom Daniel's Bad Water Western RR

Tom Daniel's Bad Water Western RR layout; RM Jan '74

Last night I was re-reading John Olson's article about his Cielo Lumber Co. layout that appeared in the January 1974 issue of Railroad Modeler. As often happens I wound up rummaging through the entire issue. In the process I stumbled across this photo of a little 2'x4' layout built by Tom Daniel. 

You may recall that a few years ago I wrote about how Tom Daniel was one of Railroad Modeler's founding contributors. He published a number of articles there from Dec '71 to Nov '72, but then wasn't seen again in its pages. Well, even though he didn't have an article in the Jan '74 issue, this photo of a layout he built for the Model Railroading Industry Association show held in Orange County, California in October 1973 was in it. So, it looks like he was still doing something with model trains in '73 and '74.

The accompanying article about the show mentions that Daniel's diorama "... incorporates a large highway in a logical manner. More on this in later issues." Well, this is 30Squares, so I'm off to look up those later issues :-)

Running back to Bill Schopp

Vince alerted me to these 2 excellent videos by Tom Pierpoint about customizing brass locomotives. It's very impressive stuff.

Interestingly both make a tip-of-the-hat to Bill Schopp and his legendary loco customization projects.

The other thing that's been on my mind this week is The Guess Who. When I was in Austin recently I got into a long discussion about this and that in a record store with my friend's cousin. Somehow we got onto the topic of The Guess Who and their early 2000s Running Back Thru Canada tour. Since I've returned I've gotten all nostalgic and have been playing the videos from that show. There should be no doubt that Winnipeg is the great music city of Canada.

Town & Country Charger...via the E. L. Moore School of Design?

Last fall I bought a stack of old Car Model magazines. It was the Sept '72 issue that got me started as a serious model maker, so I have a sentimental attachment to the magazine.

I was re-reading a few from the stack last night and came across this story in the June '70 issue by R. Keith Blackmon on how to add exterior wood paneling to a 1/24 scale car. He chose a Dodge Charger for the treatment!

The car looks quite handsome and gives me some ideas. But, the big question is: since it used 1/32" thick balsa for the edge trim, was this E. L. Moore inspired? :-)

Model of LBJ's ranch house

We were visiting Austin, TX recently and had the opportunity to tour the LBJ Presidential Library. I highly recommend it to anyone visiting Austin. It's a fascinating building and the exhibits are excellent. Being interested in miniature folk art buildings my radar instantly latched onto this model of LBJ's ranch house.

The model was made by Mr. Ralph Doppler and given to the president and first lady on Easter Sunday, 1966 after the service at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg. According to this Facebook post at the Friends of Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park:

"Mr. Doppler was a local refrigeration engineer who would later be honored by the Gillespie County Historical Society for his work on wooden scale models of historical buildings."

Ladybird Johnson noted in her audio diary:

"Mr. Ralph Doppler who makes models for a hobby had constructed a very minute, detailed, excellent model of our Ranch house, complete, even to the Eagle over the front door of the stone part." 

I'm not sure what scale it is. Maybe something between O and S? It hardly matters. It's quite a decent model and well preserved.

Moon Train: Is DARPA finally keeping up with MR?

MR's lunar railway in the Apr '78 issue

Earlier this week I stumbled across an article in Business Insider about DARPA contracting Northrup Grumman to come up with a design for a lunar railway.

It's getting close to April Fool's Day and I wondered if the story was an elaborate joke. It turns out, no, it's real all right*. I don't fault myself with thinking this could be a joke because back in the April '78 issue of Model Railroader they published a story by Alan Cerny and Bob Hayden on how to build a model railway set on the moon. It was complete with model photos, extensive line drawings, and a track plan, It was also an elaborate April Fool's joke. I should have known because traditionally in the April issue model railroad magazines often included one tongue-in-cheek story. This was one for 1978, but I was duped and took it seriously. Maybe the good people at Northrup Grumman should jump in a time machine and have a look :-)

Speaking of having a look, take a look at this April Fool's lunar railway mockumentary. Pay special attention at the 9 minute mark.

*Well, if it does turn out to be a joke, there's no fool like an old train fool.

A 3D Printed Version of E. L. Moore's Rube's Rhubarb Plant

3D printed version of Rube's Rhubarb Plant

A reader kindly alerted me to a 3D printed version of E. L. Moore's Rube's Rhubarb Plant that's currently for sale on eBay.

I've been wondering for awhile when 3D printed versions of E. L. Moore's projects would arrive. I wonder no more. They're here.

Book Talk

Google search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

A year ago today I published my E. L. Moore eBook: The Model Buildings of E. L. Moore. If you don’t have a copy, good news, I have an infinite supply of free ones and you can get yours here :-) You can also get a copy from Library and Archives Canada.

So far it’s had 872 downloads, which is 772 more than my wildest dreams. Downloads have petered off a lot as the months have rolled on. It does maybe 4 or 5 a week these days. I think that’s to be expected as there’s a limited readership for this sort of thing. 

Bing search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

But, still, for an odd little digital monograph that’s had no notice in the traditional model railroading media, I’m quite surprised at the uptake. I hope it will keep circulating, and maybe E. L. Moore’s work will continue to inspire and entertain modellers young and old. 

DuckDuckGo search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

I don’t see a 2nd edition on the horizon, although there are many gaps and weak spots in the research I’d like to fill if I can. If anything comes up you’ll read about it here. And, of course, if you know anything about E. L. Moore and his work, I’d sure like to hear about it and discuss it with you. 

Yahoo search results for "E. L. Moore eBook"

One of the book’s weakest parts are the paragraphs on what he did between being released from the navy in 1918 at the end of World War I and arriving in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1933. We only have glimpses of his life during this 15 year period: furniture salesman, paper mill worker, vagabond, and who knows what else. He seems to have moved around a bit in the eastern US. He was in New York for a while and there was some wandering in the Great Smoky Mountains. He hints at other places - even a county jail for loitering in some southern town! - in his model railroad articles, but that’s all they are, hints. It’s often impossible to discern what's real and what is Moore just pulling our leg.

Those hints of mid life adventure provide inspiration for many of his projects, as did his boyhood life on the farm prior to joining the navy. He read a lot, studied lots of photographs, and shot the breeze with friends in the hobby a lot, but that information obtained at a remove wasn’t all there was to his inspiration. His own direct experience seemed to be the foundation for his model building work, and he drew on it just as much as from those other sources, maybe more at times. 

A section of the AGO's Tom Thomson panel gallery

We were in Toronto in January and had the opportunity to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario. I wanted to see the Tom Thomson gallery. I hadn’t done any research prior to going. My Tom Thomson ‘knowledge’ at the time was basically: 1) Thomson was a revolutionary wilderness painter, 2) Thomson was tangentially associated with The Group of Seven, and 3) Thomson produced a number of now iconic Canadian landscape paintings. So, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

Thomson is a big name in Canadian painting. Shelves and shelves have been written about him, but here’s his Wikipedia entry for a good summary. He was born in 1877, roughly a generation before E. L. Moore, who was born in 1898. Thomson died in July 1917 about a month before his 40th birthday. Even though he was a graphic designer by trade he practiced as a painter for only the last 5 years of his life. During those years he’d go up north to Ontario’s Algonquin Park in the good weather months for fishing, painting, and canoeing. His art activities consisted of making in situ sketch paintings on small wooden boards of the lakes, rivers, woodlands, trees, lumber camps, and bush. He’d winter in Toronto and turn many of his sketch paintings into proper saleable canvas paintings. To make this way of life happen during those years he appeared to live a very frugal existence.

Unlike Moore who died of arteriosclerosis at age 81, Thomson’s career was cut short when he was not quite half Moore’s age. On 8 July 1917 Thomson went missing on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park and his body wasn’t found until July 16. Some say he was murdered, others say suicide, others say it was simply a canoeing accident. The cause of his death remains a mystery, but what isn’t a mystery was he died at the height of his painting powers and we’re the worse off for it. 

A Thomson canvas painting near panel sources

It’s those sketch paintings he made while up north in the wilderness that caught my attention. I was aware of his larger canvas works, but those little on site sketches were news to me. All I can say is that when I saw them I felt, yeah, yeah, that’s what it’s like out there. I don’t know how he did it but I could feel that he had captured how it is in that environment. Now when I look at his canvas paintings they seem a little remote to me now that I’ve seen their sources.

Thomson's palette / sketch box (NGC photo)

He had a painting system of course so he could do his sketches while in a canoe or out in the woods. Anyone would have to have one so as not to make a mess of things. In preparation for painting season he’d make up a bunch of 8.5” x 11” wood panels, usually of birch, for painting his sketches on. He also had a custom palette / sketch box for taking into the field. That upside-down photo sourced from the National Gallery of Canada shows it. The upper part, at the bottom of the photo, has slots to hold two panels. They allow for a panel to be held for painting while a second panel waits its turn, or is drying. The lower part is for supporting the palette while painting. Two painted panels can be held securely and separately for transport back to camp without worrying about getting them smeared in transit. From that simple equipment, direct observation, and great skill came 400 or so amazing paintings on small wood boards.

After getting back home I found out there was a book published in 2023 about his field sketches called Tom Thomson: North Star. I can’t comment on the quality of its essays, but the draw for me are the 150 nearly full size colour reproductions of his sketch paintings. I recommend the book on the strength of those alone.

I’ve talked about the importance of direct field observation before. I think if we knew more about E. L. Moore’s life when he was ‘out in the field’ during those missing 15 years, we’d be able to better appreciate how his model work developed and its influences. Like Thomson I think Moore made extensive use of his experiences in his work, but unlike Thomson, the record of Moore’s life experiences is quite thin.

You know, maybe I should back away from saying things like “…we’d be able to better appreciate...” because it might only be me who could better appreciate. I don’t think many people are interested in this aspect of model railroading. I’m obsessed with origin stories and finding out influences. My own hobby horse is that direct observation and experience are the most important and best influences, especially in our era. 

In E. L. Moore’s stories he’d often talk about Cousin Cal. These days the friendly, affable, although sometimes slow and bumbling, Cousin Cal has been elbowed out of the way by Cousin SAL, Cousin Screen Attention Lock. SAL seems to be everybody’s cousin, even mine I must admit. He demands everyone’s attention at all times for all things. Seeing and experiencing for yourself without him mediating seems almost sacrilegious, and he’ll do his darnedest to convince you that it is. He encourages conformity and group think and that’s the last sort of influence anyone should want. He’s the influencer’s influencer. I suspect E. L. Moore would not have gotten along with Cousin SAL given that Moore didn’t have much truck with the dominant screen of his day, the tv, even though he did appear on it once. I don’t think Cousin SAL could convince him to watch Gilligan’s Island or The Beverly Hillbillies.

Yes, the irony of me pontificating about the evils of screens on a screen isn’t lost on me. Before I leave and try and stop my head from exploding from the contradictions, let me wrap up by noting two interesting books I found at the AGO gift shop.

The AGO has a large collection of ship models as part of the Ken Thomson collection. Although they share the same last name I don’t think Ken Thomson and Tom Thomson are related. Ken Thomson was at one time the wealthiest person in Canada and donated his vast art collection to the AGO in 2002, which included many works by Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven as well as a large number of high quality ship models. The 2009 paperback, Ship Models, published by Skylet documents the collection. It is obviously a subsidized publication as it’s an extremely high quality product that only cost me something like $14.95 in the gift shop. That’s crazy cheap for what it is: an excellent example of what a book about a scale model collection could be. Estimates I got for producing a similar sort of physical E. L. Moore book would have resulted in a typical retail price of $90US for US sales and $135CDN for Canadian - and those are with me making zero profit. At those prices even I wouldn’t buy my own book.

305 Lost Buildings of Canada was an impulse buy based on the title and intriguing cover. What you see is what you get. There are 305 of those blocky, black and white facade drawings, each with a paragraph telling something about the associated lost building. Although the drawings are sort of reminiscent of Seth’s Dominion caricatures they do give a sense of the buildings. If you’re interested in photos of the real things you can always go to the internet. 

View from Shell / Bulova Tower; late 70s or early 80s

When I stumbled across the entry for Toronto’s Shell Tower (aka the Bulova Tower) at Exhibition Place old memories bubbled up through my grey matter. In olden times I thought it was quite thrilling to go to the top of the tower and look out over the Ex. Maybe it was that memory lurking in my brain that got me to buy the book in the first place: the Shell Tower is dead centre on the book’s cover! Talk about subliminal messaging :-)

Well, a not so subliminal message is nagging me for coffee, so I’m off to refuel my grey cells before they all decide to explode.

Dimensioning the Imperial Six's foyer

The Imperial Six's foyer is a tricky thing. I've been putting off building it for quite some time. I think I've been a little intimidated by it.

Suitably fortified with a jug of coffee I decided to dive in and figure out the foyer's dimensions.

The job was something of a trial and error exercise where I consulted photos of the foyer and worked on resolving its elements with dimensions of standard size commercial doors and HO scale figures until I got an arrangement that looked right. You may recall I bungled the entry door size on Coles and wanted to get the Imperial Six looking correct before I started cutting plastic.

I cut a piece of Bristol board into an L-shape that would fit snuggly inside the model's foyer space and drew on the various elements in pencil. This temporary piece allowed me to see how the finished insert would look. I continued to make some adjustments at this stage to get things to look right. I realize the foyer is still 2-D at this point, but I tried to be mindful of the 3-D shapes and spaces that would result as I drew up the insert. It doesn't look too bad, so it's on to picking movies for the sign board :-)

Left and right walls are the same

Buddy, do ya got a light?

Added LED strip.

Added interior box.

Empty interior box.

Worn sign.

Foundation leaks light.

Down on its luck.

When's the next streetcar get here?

The Toronto Three

E. L. Moore's Carolina Foundry in paper

Left: E. L. Moore's original | Right: Clever Models kit

Galen alerted me to this very decent paper model of E. L. Moore's Carolina Foundry by Clever Models. I couldn't resist doing a side-by-side comparison with Mr. Moore's original.

Design Notes on Sight Lines: Roads, Paths, Sidewalks, and Track

Main street on LOL II, aka the 'Way Out Layout'

Photographing the Red Car Barn revived my thinking about an organizing principle I like a model railroad to have: lines I can sight down. Along with buildings one can see into and through, I consider interesting sight lines essential. I like to have a sun roof in a car too, but that's another story :-)

These lines can be provided by roads, paths, sidewalks, and of course track. It was on the LOL that I first played with lines, mainly through the addition of roads and sidewalks to connect the different parts of the layout. I'd look at various areas and think, could someone walk or drive or cycle there, or if they took the train or streetcar, how would they get around when they got off? I made physical changes in answer to those questions.

I think when I had developed the layout to a certain point sight lines became obscure, and that was a contributing factor to me taking the LOL apart. Looking back, when I added a shelf extension for the World's Biggest Bookstore I inadvertently changed a long, open view of the main street into a canyon that was harder to look into. Some interesting pictures resulted, but in the end it was limiting.

Ocean Alley

The follow up to the LOL, the never finished Alta Vista TC, was a sight lines disappointment. I didn't learn from bad sight lines created on the LOL. I built a main road on the Alta Vista TC for the streetcars walled in on both sides by buildings. I focused too much on having open real estate for buildings, and not enough on looking at them and the streetcars once everything was in place. I'd have to look over the back sides of the buildings to watch the streetcars. Eventually it seemed to me that as well as being far too big for my workshop, it didn't have enough possible views, and was going to become a boring exercise in making buildings simply to fill in open spaces along the main drag. The main drag was a going to be a drag.

So, on LOL II, the main street (still unnamed) is built up on just one side so I can get as many long views, or sideways panoramas, as I can dream up. There're no buildings 'on the other side' blocking my view. The one way street, Ocean Alley (name still up in the air), is a quasi-canyon: buildings on one side and a broken edge of trees, buildings, rocks, and small buildings on the other, but there's a long, so far interesting sight line.

Then there's the sight line from the parking / unloading track that starts at Ocean Alley and sticks into the pad where the urban buildings are located.

And there's the view down the track that runs along the edge of the beach. You can also see the parking / unloading track that intersects Ocean Alley that I previously mentioned.

The last long sight line runs along the dirt path that starts around the Red Car Barn, snakes past the surf shop, beachside cottages and the Ocean View Hotel, and ends at the Barbecue off in the distance  

The bird's eye view shows dense packed buildings in the urban area. From above it's certainly not realistic, but there is method to my madness.

A few months ago I was cleaning up the workshop and moving things around. I collected up all the little buildings I could see and randomly set them on the layout just to get them out of harm's way. All of the Toronto buildings went upstairs and were placed on a shelf.

After I'd done a bit of tidying up I glanced over at the layout and rather liked the jumble of structures. It had that packed in feel I was looking for. Organizationally it was wrong, but it felt right.

The next day I started to slide the models around, looking for sight lines and opening walkways to the sidewalk along Ocean Alley. This created a number of secondary and shorter sight lines out to the ocean. I also found many of the buildings were in need of minor repairs, so maintenance was done along with urban planning. 

Planning a downtown Toronto micro layout

I also realized that my Toronto buildings were going to need their own little layout to properly capture the feeling I wanted to get across with them - that's something else I wasn't able to accomplish with the Alta Vista TC. 

While in an urban planning mood I did a bit of fiddling with those buildings too to see if a micro-layout would suffice. It turned out a layout a little larger than micro sized might work, but development of that is for another time.

I'm not done fiddling with the LOL II's organization, but I feel it's heading in the right direction. Maybe it always will be just heading somewhere and never really arriving. That's ok as long as it keeps heading to interesting configurations. 

I know this isn't model railroading. It's just me creating a layout based on what I like and want to look at. It's just playing around.

Getting back to the LOL II, this is one of the secondary walkways that connects main street to Ocean Alley. At the entry is the Towers discount store on the left and the Chapters on the right. You can see one of the tall beach spotlights off in the distance.

There are 4 of these secondary sight lines branching off the main street.

I made sure the little Centennial Experimental Farm, LOL III, layout also had a main sight line: the pedestrian gravel path that runs the entire length of the layout from the street .....

... to the apex of the turn around loop. The visual implication is that the path crosses the road and leads to the farm's other facilities.

There's also a secondary sight line along the gravel path that is used to lead the cows from an off site barn to the pasture on the layout. It crosses a road and the streetcar has to stop at the crossing.

So the paths lead the eye into the layout and are used to imply there's a surrounding world of which this is a piece.

 

Establishing sight lines on the Loonar Module was tricky, and I wasn't completely successful. I think it's because the layout is basically a circle.

In this case I tried to establish two leading into the centre of the island. One runs from the end of the dock and up the concrete steps to the shed at the top...

... and the other extends from the end of the causeway, across the circular test track, and up the gravel road to the parking spot.

I think in this case the visual interest is created by the 4 separate scenes - which blend into each other as one walks around the layout - carved out by the tall trees, which create an effective visual barrier. The Toronto layout will also use tall elements - skyscrapers instead of trees - to separate scenes.

EVRR's valley beyond the long dividing trestle

I'm not sure if E. L. Moore's Elizabeth Valley RR had any distinctive or signature sight lines. It doesn't look like it did. Maybe along the trestle that divided the layout in two?

I think what it was famous for was it's level of completion. Being a rather small layout at 4'x6' it was a good showcase of what a model railroader of modest means could achieve. The level of detail and finish that went into the layout was impressive, even by today's standards.

If it did have dramatic sight lines they would be difficult to photograph as it's my understanding that E. L. Moore used a Graflex press camera. Even a 35 mm SLR would be difficult to maneuver in and amongst the layout's features for dramatic perspective photos. The N-scale tribute layout and a digital camera might uncover some interesting views.