Streetniks

After embedding the Shuffle Demon's Spadina Bus video along with the Rapido New Look bus notes, I went looking for the Shuffle Demon's lp in my vinyl collection. Yeap, it was there. On the back it suggests the Spadina Bus video was recorded at the corner of Queen & Spadina on 25 April 1986. Punch those coordinates into your time machine for your next trip :-)

Magazine heaven is in London? Who knew?

According to this NYT article, All Good Magazines Go to Heaven, the world's largest private magazine collection is the Hyman Archive in London, located in the 18th-century Royal Arsenal complex in Woolwich. Over on the left is the beginnings of the 30 Squares Model Railroading Archive  :-) That stack contains Railroad Model Craftsmans from when Model Craftsman changed over to being RMC in 1949, through the '50s, '60s - Vince has the '70s and '80s - '90s, '00s and into the '10s. Although, there are many holes in the collection that need filling. And one box in the stack is the complete run - no holes other than a couple missing special issues - of Railroad Modeler. Off camera is a miscellaneous collection of other model railroad and model building titles. If I ever win the lottery, watch out Hyman Archive, there'll be competition from over on this side of the pond :-)

Time travel makes inflation no less shocking

Did we get the time machine out of the garage? No. Did we find strange journals in an alternative universe? Well, sorta. Did I find an old ad for the AHM trolley? Yes.

It appears that the AHM trolley was introduced in early 1976. That ad was snipped from the February '76 issue of Model Railroader and it looks like there was also one that month in Railroad Model Craftsman. $8.88 US; an internet inflation calculator tells me that translates into $38.20 US ( ~ $47.25 CDN) in today's money. What did I pay in either '76 or '77 when I bought mine at George's Trains old Mt. Pleasant store?

$16.50 CDN = $67.45 CDN today!

Transfer to a brave new world

I was going through some of my father’s old books and came across this copy of Brave New World with a '70s TTC transfer stuck between pages 78 and 79.

My father went to university later in life than most students. I was a preteen at the time, and he thought it was fine to pass on some of his books for me to read when he was done with them. In retrospect, I seemed to travel from Beatrix Potter to The Hardy Boys to Brave New World pretty fast. I don’t know if it was all for the good, but that’s what happened. He may have thought Brave New World was an antidote to the trashy science fiction I was reading. If so, he was right, although I can’t remember exactly what I thought of Brave New World back then. I suspect most of what it had to say was lost on me. But, as an adult, it’s frightening and prescient. Today we’re more-or-less living it. Check out this exchange between Bernard and Lenina from the top of page 79 where the transfer was wedged,

"Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?"

"I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays."

He laughed, "Yes, 'Everybody's happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way."

"I don't know what you mean," she repeated.

If you’re reading this post on a TTC bus, streetcar or subway right now, stop and download a copy of Brave New World and read something better.

Car 55

Being August, the Canadian National Exhibition will open soon for another year. I took this photo at the Ex sometime in the mid to late '70s. Vince informs me that it's Toronto Civc Railways car 55 that now resides at the Halton County Radial Railway museum. I took this picture with some sort of Kodak Instamatic camera that used 110 film. And to add to the nostalgia, I came across this CNE streetcar transfer from '79 while going through some of my mum's old photos.

Found in the backseat of the time machine

LTA 20-1 poster

Of all the LTA-20-1 memorabilia I have, this is my favourite. It shows the vehicle in its most positive light, and makes something that is essentially a big spherical bag of helium look rather svelte and technically feasible as a flying machine. The signature in the lower-left corner says: R. C. Beaussard. He or she has done a good job on this picture.

R/C models and computer simulations of this vehicle clearly demonstrated that it was highly maneuverable. Turn on a dime? No problem. Those engines could be vectored and throttled, so lots of different types of motion was possible. The other cool thing was that it made use of the Magnus Effect – hence the company’s name, Magnus Aerospace – to create additional lift for carrying stuff. Its helium-filled spherical envelope was mounted on an axle, which in turn was slung across that huge curved wing-yoke structure. Spinning the sphere opposite to the vehicle’s direction of flight – that is, if some super villain dropped you on the top of the sphere while it was spinning, you’d find yourself clinging for dear life while the sphere’s rotation tried to fling you back into the blimp’s wake J - created aerodynamic lift. So, you got aerodynamic lift from spinning the sphere, and static lift because it was full of helium.

The problem was that maneuverability and the unusual way of creating aerodynamic lift came at a high price. If I remember correctly, its lift-to-drag ratio – L/D in aerodynamics-speak – was always somewhere between 0.9 and maybe 1.1 at best, but usually a little below 1. When a 747 is cruising around, it has an L/D of something like 17, and a sailplane has one of maybe around 50. Drag is the cost of creating lift, so if you can get 17 units of lift for 1 unit of cost, or 50 units of lift for 1 unit of cost, that’s pretty good, but 1 unit of lift for 1 unit of cost makes me scratch my head. For a small, scale model flying over a model railroad layout this wouldn’t be much of a problem since when the batteries died, the beast would just be left floating around in the house until rescued, but for the real-McCoy, this could be trouble.

But, lift cost aside, I still like the way it’s depicted in this poster.

Mount Lowe Railway

Debra and I were recently in Pasadena, California. While there we visited The Old Whistle Stop model train store - 1987 was the last time I was there. 

It’s a great store, and when I finally wandered to the back where there is an extensive selection of railroad related books, the first one I saw was the one shown in the opening photo. It was at eye level, staring me right in the face. There was my family name in bright red letters associated with some mountain. Electric trolleys. Open vistas. I wasn’t leaving the store without this. 

I didn’t, and when I had a chance to read a few pages I found the story to be weirder than I had imagined. Well, at least from a coincidence point-of-view.

Here’s what I know so far. There was a man named Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe, born in 1832, who was the imagination and money behind an alpine scenic electric trolley line called - naturally enough - the Mount Lowe Railway that started operations in California’s San Gabriel mountains near Pasadena in July 1893. There was an inclined railway, trolley lines, hotels, observatory, overlooks, incredible views, and a grade changing circular bridge, among other things. It appears to have had both a spectacular and troubled history and eventually completely closed down in 1936. So, cool trolley line, so far so good, but, there’s more. 

Turns out that Thaddeus Lowe made his name long before developing his railway as one of the earliest experimenters in lighter-than-air flight. And for some reason he made a number of experimental flights here in Ottawa in 1858. But, apparently, he is most famous for his work in the Union Army’s Balloon Corps where he flew balloons - around 3,000 flights in all - during the American Civil War making observations, taking photos and performing ariel surveys. It struck me as an odd coincidence that this gentleman with whom I share a last name did work with lighter-than-air flight, as I also dabbled in - albeit in a minor way - early in my working life, and some of that was done in Ottawa, Canada, which is where the airship company I worked for was located and where I now live. So, there seemed like a lot of coincidences: last name, trollies, airships, Ottawa. As William Shatner might say, is that weird or what?

Debra also found a book in the store called Mount Lowe Railway which contains a collection of historical photos of scenes and locations from the railway and compares them to recent photos of the same locations. It’s an excellent collection.

From my cursory look through these two books I can imagine a rather nice little tabletop mini-layout that could be built that extracts some key features of the prototype - possibly the horseshoe curve and circular bridge - along with some mountainous western US scenery. I’ve long admired small Japanese tabletop layouts, and this might give me a chance to try to build something in that style. It would be in HO scale, but because the rolling stock would be 4-wheel trollies, the curves could be tight. I’ll have to think about this some more.

{The trailhead is on the far right to the gates of the Cobb Estate}

The staff at the Original Whistle Stop were quite friendly and one gentleman told us there isn’t anything left of the old railway, and this was confirmed by the books. Apparently all that remains is a hiking trail along the old roadbed.

{This covered bench is to the left of the estate gates. It seemed to me to be very similar to the relic streetcar stops in Ottawa.}

The trailhead is at the end of Lake Street in Altadena at the Cobb Estate. I’m told it’s a steep trail and about a 10km round trip - something I hope to attempt if I’m ever back there.

Post script

Debra, the Chief Editorial Officer here at the 30 Squares media empire, reminded me that I shouldn’t make this post without mentioning three important things. 

First, she bought me the two books mentioned in the post. Many thanks again!

Second, she pointed out that she had told me there was a place called Lowe mountain near Pasadena around a year ago, but all I had to say was a firm meh. Although we didn’t know about the trolley and airship aspect at that time, in retrospect, that was not one of my finest moments. 

Third, what was becoming a difficult trip was made a lot better once we relocated to the Pasadena Inn. It’s clean, cheerful, has nice rooms, a friendly staff, lots of parking, very reasonable rates, and is conveniently located near a Whole Foods, restaurants, a comic book store, and the Del Mar light rail station (more on this in a future post). 

Philly Friday on a Saturday

Spambots rejoice! Philly Friday is back for one final installment.

Of all the posts amongst the first 400, the 3 posts in the short-lived Philly Friday experiment were their favourites. I had more updates for the series planned, but never posted them since the first three made it clear that they attracted spambots who tried their darnedest to get me to take notice of them and go to whatever abyss they came from. I figured since this was an anniversary of sorts, I’d throw caution to the wind and mention Philly Friday one last time in order to note that Philadelphia is the missing link between Toronto and its streetcars. Author Mike Filey states it best  in the opening chapter of his excellent book, Not A One Horse Town: 125 Years of Toronto and Its Streetcars, published by back in 1986,

"...This then was the Toronto in which Alexander Easton found himself, having recently arrived from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Easton was, in fact, an Englishman who moved to the States and began promoting and building electric street railways....Very little is known about Mr. Easton other than while he was living in Philadelphia he had published a small book titled A Practical Treatise on Street or Horse Power Railways and when he moved to Upper Canada, he lived in the Village of Yorkville, just north of the city. Nevertheless, Easton must have been well regarded in Toronto for he was able to convince the City Council of the day... that the time was right for Toronto to get a street railway system of its own. After all, this type of system had more than proved itself in such cities as New York, Philadelphia and Boston. And wasn’t Toronto important?..."

The result was Toronto was running streetcars in September of 1861 just a couple of months after the necessary bylaws were passed in late July 1861. That's right: law in July, running in September.

Mr. Filey’s book has a wonderful wrap-around cover painting by artist Doug Calvert. It’s an interesting example of ‘retro-future’ circa 1986. Just fanciful, and not prototypical? Well, if the what the physicists say that in a multiverse view of things, there is some universe out there were this is an actual depiction of day-to-day life :-)

400 posts. LTA-20-1. Amtronic ranch. Philly Friday. Ah, nostalgia. Speaking of Friday, yesterday, to and from work, I listened to Guru’s old Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 from 1993. No Philadelphia, all New York. I’d completely forgotten how good it is. 

400 posts; 1 about blimps

Time flies. The latest post in the E. L. Moore series was #400 for this blog. 400 posts – well, 400 and 1 counting this one. I can hardly believe it. I know that for many blogs, 400 isn't that many, but it seems something like a milestone for me. Google’s stats say the blog has had 36,767 hits up until now, so that’s an about an average of 92 hits per post. In fact, though, the hits aren’t sprinkled evenly over all the posts; some have had a lot more than others, some a lot less, and some have been special favourites of roving spam-bots :-)

From the high hit count, and Google stats showing searches for variations on the phrase ‘HO scale airships’ that lead visitors to the blog, the post called HO-scale logging airships? has been the 2nd most hit over the years. In it I talked a little about an airship called the LTA-20-1 that was being developed in the mid ‘80s, and speculated on how an HO-scale radio-controlled flying model might be built. The real-McCoy was being designed to do things like aerial logging, lifting de-railed freight cars, and assisting with pipeline construction. For a while I was a wet-behind-the-ears junior engineer on the project with a minor role doing some flight dynamics analysis. Unfortunately, a full-scale flying prototype was never built, but it did leave me with some interesting memorabilia -now stuffed away in dusty boxes down in the basement. Here’s a scan of the project’s promotional brochure.

These days I look at it as I was participating in a rather unusual art project.

More wallowing in nostalgia

Back in the summer I bought a few old books on how to build model buildings. There’s clearly not much demand for these things because fairly good condition hardcover first-editions of many of them can be had at online used booksellers for around $5 to $20, with shipping cost in the same ballpark as the book cost no matter where in the world they are shipped from.

One of them was Vivien Thompson’s Period Railway Modelling Buildings published in 1971. After an embarrassingly long time I eventually realized that Vivien Thompson was the same Vivien Thompson who wrote an article called Modelling 4mm scale Trams in the Sept ’73 issue of Model Railway Constructor. I was starting to get rail crazy at that time, and was very happy to ‘discover’ that magazine at a W. H. Smith bookstore on a shopping trip with my parents. Her article described how to build some simple old-fashioned horse drawn trams in OO scale, and I eagerly gave it a try using cardboard instead of sheet styrene. Interestingly she mentions in the article that she “at last succumbed to solvent rather than tube styrene glue”. In her book she stated she was a staunch advocate of tube glues. 

None of the cardboard trams I built survived the years, and now that I have some work with sheet styrene under my belt, this project offers an enticing retro challenge. 

Wallowing in nostalgia

My introduction to model railroading was via the August ’73 issue of Model Railroader magazine. That issue set the hook. I don’t buy the magazine as much as I used to, so I thought I could just saunter down to my local bookstore anytime this month to pick up a copy of the August 2013 issue. No such luck. Every bookstore and hobby shop where I’d usually find it only had September issues, and any leftover August issues had all been sent back to wherever they came from. 

There’s a slightly run-down smoke shop a few blocks from our house that I hadn’t been to in a few years that sold some magazines, so as a last ditch attempt I decided to walk over there since it’s summer and the weather is great. Bingo. He had a few June, July and August issues on his shelf. Prize in hand, I headed back home. The irony in all this for me was that back in ’73, I had to walk everywhere I wanted to go, and I bought my MRs at a smoke shop just a few blocks from my parent’s house since there weren’t any nearby hobby shops or other stores that sold model train magazines of any type. 

To say that the magazine has changed a lot in 40 years is merely stating the obvious, but, interestingly, just as there was in the ’73 issue, there is an article in the 2013 one on how to scratch-build a simple HO-scale structure: an old-time water tower in the 2013 issue; in the ’73 issue it was E. L. Moore’s Bunn’s feed and seed. 

I must admit though that I like the cover of the ’73 issue better. I’m always impressed that often the covers from issues in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s had just a carefully composed picture supplemented with a few words to highlight what could be found inside.  Modern day covers certainly explain the contents better at a glance, but they seem less striking than their predecessors. Then again, I don’t work in the magazine business, so I don’t have any insight into what sells in today’s market.

---

Post script

Although I haunted many smoke shops in my youth, I’ve never smoked. Back then those places sold a lot more than just cigars and cigarettes. Amongst all the other stuff for sale, the two near my parent’s house had what seemed like to the youthful me large selections of plastic model kits and hobby magazines, so they were stand-ins for more reputable hobby shops :-)

Interurban derailment?

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I was going through the family archives and came across these three photographs. They weren't all in the same albums, but the first and third may have been taken at the same event. I don't know if the second one is part of the group, but the body language of the men in the photo suggests something important might be happening.

All I know about these photos is purely speculative. My best guess is that they were taken somewhere in upstate New York, possibly near Rochester, sometime in the 1920s.

June 1974 and June 2012

[That's June 1974 on the left, and June 2012 on the right.]

A couple of days ago I was chatting on the phone with my friend vp. He told me he had a photo in the June Model Railroader Trackside Photos section (page 77), so I picked up a copy on my way out of town.

[Here's the centre-fold of each issue. That's a J. Harold Geissel drawing in the June '74 issue on the left.]

I had picked up some issues of Model Railroader from 1972 a few weeks ago and I'm still thinking about those old issues. The oldest June issue I have in my collection is June 1974. From the covers, you can see the difference in styles between then and now. The '74 issue has that strong '70s image orientation, and the 2012 has lots of textual call-outs. Although, it's interesting that both cover designs use the diagonal as the organizing element.

40 years ago in May 1972

I picked up four issues of Model Railroader from 1972 on the weekend. The January issue contained E. L. Moore’s Dollar Model article on how to build his Carolina Foundry, so I was happy with that find. The cover of the May issue was one of those that didn’t have any text on it telling the potential purchaser about what was inside. The image isn’t as visually striking as that on the October ’73 cover, but I’m always impressed by the calmness – and confidence - of these advertising free covers.

The inside back cover has this fun Atlas ad. I’m a sucker for these kinds of drawings.

July 1922, back garden, Arbordale Ave, Rochester, NY

I admit upfront that this post has nothing to do with model railroading, but I found this picture quite interesting. I came across it at the same time as I found the Rochester streetcar photo from 1923. This isn't one of those poncy designer gardens we see these days on 'reality' home reno tv shows, it's quite clearly a working garden - almost a small farm - in what I think then was almost considered to be the suburbs.

Saturday, 28 April 1923, Highland Park, Rochester, NY

I recently came across these photos in our family archive. The first is a view apparently taken along South Avenue in Rochester, New York, opposite Highland Park. I don't know the company that operated the streetcar. The bottom photo is looking into the park. Although I know I shouldn't be, I'm always amazed at the difference between the early 20th century and its final years.

Russian train in watercolour

I stumbled across this 45 rpm record while looking for some old Christmas LPs at my father's house. I like the cover art: a rather striking watercolour painting of a stream train high above a bright winter scene populated with cross-country skiers. I think he bought this record one summer in the International Pavilion at the CNE in the late 60s or early 70s. From the pristine condition of the record, I don't think it had ever been played. I gave it a spin, but the music wasn't to my taste.

Niagara Falls Trolley Cards

Over the Christmas holidays I was browsing through the family files at my father’s house and came across a post card set that was bought as a souvenir of a trip – probably taken by my mother’s mother ‘s family - to Niagara Falls.

I don’t know anything certain about the dates of either the vacation, or the cards, but they might both date from the 1920s. The set contains 11 cards, each one printed on both sides, of views of the falls, boats, bridges, and trolleys. They are quite beautiful. I like the ambience of these images. Debra and I last visited the falls back in 2010, and some of that feel still lingers there if one looks for it, but there’s a lot of Las Vegas there too.