Colourized old-time water tank scene on E. L. Moore's EKRR

Colourized photo created by Gemini

A reader's comment on the last colourized E. L. Moore photo I posted got me thinking about colourizing more photos. I thought the water tank scene on the EKRR might make an interesting colour photo and I think I was right.

E. L. Moore's photo of his old-time water tank diorama

These exercises in colourization have got me thinking. It should be possible to take the information we have in colour photos of Mr. Moore's models, along with paint colour specifications he gave in his articles and knowledge of railroad colour conventions and create speculative colour images with AI tools of what his layouts may have looked like. I emphasize 'speculative' because we may never know what his layout actually looked like in colour, but we maybe able to develop an approximation. I might undertake this project next year.

Such an exercise might also be useful in discovering previously overlooked details in his photos. When I saw this post's colour photo the little building on the left jumped out at me, likely because of the red / green contrast. There's a sign on that building, but I couldn't read it so I asked Gemini to have a go. It proposed 'M of W', but its reasoning seemed all guess work to me. We had a further discussion about the sign, but it went off on a tangent about railroad signs and naming conventions. Frankly, it couldn't read the sign and didn't want to admit it. Regardless, colour makes image details more readily apparent that weren't so in the original. There might be discoveries to be made.

Finally, you may want to compare Gemini's colour water-tank to the model of built by David Fugere that I posted about last year. It just emphasizes that Gemini's interpretation is just that, one interpretation among many.