An E. L. Moore Christmas Photo

A Gemini colourization of this .....

If you were to say I'm becoming obsessed with colourizing old E. L. Moore photographs I'd have to agree. The old photo below has a Christmas vibe to it so I thought now was a good time to ask Gemini to colourize it.

.... E. L. Moore black-and-white photograph.

To me these colourizations, even though they are speculative, bring his work back to life. His old layouts and dioramas seem new and vital, not relics of the past. Attempting to make 'accurate' colourizations will be an interesting project for the new year.

Snow on E. L. Moore's EKRR

Gemini's colourization after a couple of prompts

It's been snowing like crazy here and it got me thinking I should try asking Gemini to colourize one of E. L. Moore's snow scenes. I thought the photo below Mr. Moore shot of his giant snowplow model was a suitable candidate.

The lead-in colour photo wasn't the first image Gemini produced. This one was:

Gemini's first attempt at colourizing the photo

I didn't ask it to colour the loco green and the plow red. I thought the green was an interesting choice given it was E. L. Moore's favourite colour. This was likely just a coincidence, but it was an interesting one. I had to ask Gemini in a second prompt for black.

Snow must be a rare occurrence for those fellows digging out the train given how lightly dressed they are.

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.

An E. L. Moore inspiration?

Did this ...

After typing up yesterday's post about E. L. Moore's old-time water tank I started to wonder about his statement that he based the model on a photograph likely taken in the 1940s. Since his phrasing made it sound like he didn't take the photo himself I wondered if he got it from a book. I knew he had access to Beebe and Clegg's books Mixed Train Daily and When Beauty Rode The Rails so I decided to look through them to see if the water tank photo was in either.

I couldn't find a water tank similar to the one he modelled, but I did stumble across that picture on the left in the lead photo to this post from When Beauty Rode The Rails, which got me thinking about how it resembled the photo below from the E. L. Moore archive. Did one inspire the other? We'll likely never know. But, as Yogi Berra might have said, the similarities are very similar :-)

... inspire this?

David Fugere's version of E. L. Moore's Old-Time Water Tank

Left: David Fugere's model (photo used with permission) | Right: E. L. Moore's (E. L. Moore Archives)

Paul is doing a great job keeping his eyes open for new versions of E. L Moore projects. Recently he alerted me to this excellent HO model by David Fugere of a water tank E. L. Moore built and described in the article, An old-time water tank, that appeared in the Spring 1959 issue of Model Trains. David kindly allowed me to post a picture of his water tank and notes it's built from "Balsa, card, plastic and a few commercial parts."

In the article E. L. Moore mentions his model was based on a photograph - it's not freelanced - but from the way he talks about the photo I don't think he shot it:

"My photo of the prototype doesn't tell me where the old veteran saw service, but it was obviously still in use when photographed, sometime in the early 1940's."

I was hoping the article contained some tall tale about how he stumbled across the prototype on one of his adventures, but no such luck.

It looks like Mr. Moore used the water tank as a background structure in the photos of his Grizzly Flats depot that appeared a few years later in the March 1962 issue of Model Trains. In the photo below from his archives it seems for some mysterious reason he renamed the depot Blue Lake and shot another series of photos. The thing that remains the same though is the water tank appears in the background of both.

Blue Lake depot, aka Grizzly Flats depot, photo circa early 1960s (E. L. Moore Archive)

He Builds Railroads - Then Scraps Them

He Builds Railroads - Then Scraps Them is an interview with E. L. Moore that appeared in the Sunday, January 19, 1958 edition of the The Charlotte Observer. The story was written by David Hayhow. The article was found and generously sent to me by Maria David, Newsroom Researcher and Photo Archivist at The Charlotte Observer. She's also the writer behind The Charlotte Observer's Retro Charlotte blog. I'd like to thank her for taking the time to answer my inquiry and providing the link to this most interesting article.

I've no wife, automobile or television so I can live as I please in complete peace. 

This love of leisure leads Moore to write for magazines, illustrate his articles with photos, collect and catalog some 1,000 books, and dabble in guns and art.

Some 1,000 books. Wow! There's a lot in that article, especially non-model railroad stuff that helps me get a little better understanding of E. L. Moore. But, I must admit, he seems a little ill-at-ease. He also seems to have a diabolical look about him in the photo. Maybe he hadn't dealt with the media much at that point in his career. He was barely 3 years into his 24 year long publishing career, so he might have been still learning the ropes.

The photos at the top of the article are of his Water Wheel Mill model, so they help to put a date on that project. The paper even created a side-by-side photo with the prototype as I did when I came across the surviving photos. The photo at the bottom of the article looks like another one of his tunnel shots along Goat Pass, but with a flat car I haven't seen before.

Like I've said many times before, there's lots of material still out there waiting to be found.

[20 April Update: At first I had a link to the article so you could read it; however, it turns out to be a password protected link to a private db which I can't post - I respect that. I may take another crack at writing a post about the article to summarize a few key points.]

Stumped by the Eagleroost & Koontree RR

This photo should have been included in the E. L. Moore, photographer, super-cut.

Wales meets Colorado on the Eagleroost & Koontree RR

That Eagleroost & Koontree locomotive is a mongrelish cross between something Welsh and something Coloradish.

E. L. Moore remarks on the lineage of E & K locomotive #5.

After a little searching based on E. L. Moore's remark that this locomotive is largely scratch built over a Kemtron Teakettle frame, it looks like he used Kemtron's brass HOn3 Teakettle 0-4-0 kit for the running gear, boiler and most of the structure forward of the cab. That's the American, or more specifically in Mr. Moore's terms, the Coloradish part of the model :-)

He didn't use the kit's cab but built his own, and it does resemble narrow gauge locomotive cabs of Welsh heritage. I can't point to a specific prototype, but it seems to capture the general look of cabs on those machines. You can also see that he added a set of wheels under the cab's back end.

Mr. Moore also noted that it has a couple of interchangeable pilots, making it a general purpose workhorse on the Wales-orado mountains of the Eagleroost & Koontree.

Down Brakes!

They come down that grade and out of that tunnel like a bat out of -- well, out of a cave. That Eagleroost & Koontree locomotive is a mongrelish cross between something Welsh and something Coloradish. Largely scratch built over a Kemtron Teakettle frame, it has a couple of interchangeable pilots and stacks, has a Brill leading truck under it's rear, and the cab is pretty well detailed (Johnson bar, gauges, firebox door, oilcan, scoop and fire hook). Stock car and box are also scratch built of course, and of course that's narrow gauge country (HOn3).

"Pump faster!"

If these are the guys who stole the money, they must have dropped it into the canyon.

A goat at Goat Pass

Goat Pass on the Eagleroost & Koontree seems to be prone to obstructions. First it was snow, now a goat. With a name like Goat Pass, I guess this happens a lot :-)

Luckily, our intrepid photographer was there to capture the goat removal procedure.

But, at night in the summer, it makes for a perfect hobo camp.

Cabeese for the Eagleroost & Koontree RR

Ok, you're right, the plural of caboose is cabooses, not cabeese, but cabeese seems more in keeping with the E&K vibe. 

We saw #12 on snowplow duty in Goat Pass, and #123 was the subject of E. L. Moore's December 1961 article in Model Trains called The little red caboose.

E. L. Moore's old-time water tank

A snapshot-sized version of the above photo accompanied E. L. Moore's An old-time water tank in the Spring 1959 issue of Model Trains. The above picture was scanned from an 8x10 original and it gives a much better impression of the model and its setting than the magazine's reproduction.

Mr. Moore used the water tank as a background prop in this photo of the Grizzly Flats station that appeared in his March 1962 Model Trains article, Grizzly Flats. This image was also scanned from a 8x10 original. Mr. Moore's avatar, the cloaked photographer, appears on the track taking a picture of the scene.

[Cover of the inaugural edition of Elementum magazine.]

About the time I was scanning the E. L. Moore photos, I came across this interesting post called One Image And A 1000 (or fewer) Words by Mike Cougill, and this short post called Elementum by Warren Ellis. They got me thinking that it would be interesting to have a journal that focused only on model railroad photography and writing. Not how-to, layout tours, kit reviews or such things, but evocative or dramatic photos, old or new, along with stories and essays, done in a format that was nowhere near similar to a Power Point slide deck or tabloid news magazine. It wouldn't make a profit, that's what makes it only a dream.

Snowplow for the Eagleroost & Koontree RR

[Plowing snow along E. L. Moore's Eagleroost & Koontree HOn3 railroad.]

E. L. Moore's articles have mentioned at various times three model railroads that he's built: the Elizabeth Valley Railroad, a 4'x6' foot HO-scale layout, pictures of which were featured in many photo essays and building construction articles; The Enskale Hoentee Railroad, a 30" x 30", N, HOn2 1/2, and T scale project layout he built for Railroad Model Craftsman in its October, November and December '68 issues; and the Eagleroost & Koontree, an HOn3 'layout'. 

I put layout in quotes because I think it wasn't a layout in the usual sense, but a narrow gauge model railroad that was staged on some sections of the Elizabeth Valley Railroad and in temporary stand-alone dioramas and scenes. 

These are some photos Mr. Moore staged along the E & K to show-off a giant snowplow that was featured in his January 1961 Model Trains article, Snowplow in an evening.

[Virginia and Truckee Railroad Locomotive #18 with snowplow. Sourced from the University of Nevada, Reno Library]

When I came across these photos I thought that plow was some fanciful thing that E. L. Moore had cooked up, but he states in his article, when you've finished, you should have a graceful replica of an oldtime plow such as was used on the old Virginia & Truckee and many other lines back around the turn of the century. And some internet searching confirmed that it was an actual plow.

The thing I find mindblowing about the article is the lavish attention paid to what is admitted to be a model that cost no more than 10 cents to make. The article has no photos of the plow in various stages of construction, but instead has 4 large, elaborately staged photos of the plow in action clearing Goat Pass on the E & K. I think the 'construction' article was just an excuse to show-off some fine photos.

Here's a game to consider: take a cheap, insignificant piece of model railroad equipment, or some other innocuous model railroad prop you happen to have around, and use it as the centrepiece in a staged scene. Photograph it. What kind of story can you tell? Where does the story lead?

Here's the locomotive and caboose without the plow. The loco's likely freelanced, or "mongrelish", as Mr. Moore notes in the card taped to the back of the photo.