An enhancement of the track plan for E. L. Moore's Elizabeth Valley Railroad

An enhancement created by Gemini of the photograph of the postcard track plan

Longtime readers may remember that from fall 2016 to spring 2017 there was a big hunt on here to figure out the track plan of E. L. Moore's Elizabeth Valley Railroad. It came to a conclusion when a generous reader sent me a photograph of one of the postcards Mr. Moore mailed to readers who wrote him asking about the EVRR track plan. He had a stack of postcards printed with the track plan on them. That's a photograph of one of the postcards shown below that the reader sent me.

A photograph of E. L. Moore's postcard track plan of his EVRR

Well, it's actually an enhancement of the image that was forwarded to me. I cleaned it up a bit to get a little better contrast. The labels aren't very clear, but the overall track plan is and ended much speculation. 

As I've been asking Gemini to do photo enhancements recently I wondered if it could clean up the track plan and read the labels on it. The lead photo to this post is what Gemini produced.

The track plan drawing is quite decent, but the labels are either dead wrong or gobbedygook. I know, and you know too, they're wrong because they don't correspond to what's at the various locations as seen in photographs of the layout.

However, I was intrigued that it put some writing that is supposed to be E. L. Moore's handwritten signature and the year 1948 in the bottom right corner. I don't see that in the original at all, and we've seen enough of Mr. Moore's signature to know the one in Gemini's image is fake; however, it was the year 1948 the caught my attention. From what we know it's conceivable he came up with the track plan in 1948, but I think he drew the postcard plan in the mid to late '50s to deal with requests. 

I started to wonder about Gemini's ability to decipher written text so I asked it to read E. L. Moore's handwritten note that appears on the back of the postcard. Here's the high resolution image I entered into Gemini for deciphering (so you can test your skills against its!):

Here's what it came up with:

This is my reading:

Here you are tho you may need a magnifying glass. Radius, elevation, wiring connections, sections all marked, if you can find em. 

Good luck, 

signed E L Moore

I think sections is more correct than signs because sections - meaning how the track has been divided into electrical blocks, or 'sections' in model railroading parlance - is more meaningful to model railroaders who are going to build this track plan. 

Regarding sections, I should review the markings in Gemini's plan that would indicate sections to a model railroader and see how they compare to my guesses about how the track was electrically divided into sections, or blocks.

I guess one lesson here is if a person can sort of read some blurry text it's likely that Gemini can also take a stab at it, but if a person just can't read it, it's unlikely Gemini can either. And, and this is a big and, without other knowledge brought to bear on Gemini's output, one must take that output with a considerably big grain of salt.