E. L. Moore's January 1970

Nice snowplow article by Delaney, and although I'm not a traction fan I enjoyed TRACTION WEEKEND thoroughly. Keep up the good work.

E. L. Moore in a letter to Hal Carstens dated 28 December 1969. Mr. Moore seemed to have a thing for snowplows and built ones for both the Eagleroost & Koontree and Elizabeth Valley RRs.

The January 1970 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman must have been a bit special to E. L. Moore, because as well as those two articles he found interesting, the issue also contained his Chittenden County Mill project and this photo of the Yank Mfg. Co., built by Mr. Ronald Kuykendall of Tucson, Arizona, that appeared in the Boomer Trail section. It was based on E. L. Moore's HOJ POJ Mfg. Co. that appeared in the April '69 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman.

[Longtime readers of this blog might recall the restoration I did on Mr. Moore's HOJ POJ Mfg. Co. Seeing this rendition of the project was fascinating. As well as being an all round fine model, Mr. Kuykendall did an excellent job on that piping and dust collectors - those items stumped me and I resorted to plastic!]

HOJPOJ outside

This past weekend was the first truly gorgeous one this year. I like taking photos of models and stuff outside, so I spent a little time getting some shots of the HOJPOJ factory in the backyard. Mixed results, but there's lots of sun still to come, so I'll keep practicing :-)

Burger with a side of meccano

Last Sunday evening I drove the van over to hodgepodge to pick up a piece of Faux Meccano I had delivered there. The boys were having some stuff shipped in by boxcar and they let me include the gear. That was the easy part. Bribing them to schlep it into the van was the hard part. I owe a lot of favours now. But that’s for later. I was hungry, so I dropped into Mels on my way home for a burger.

HOJPOJ Reno: Done!

Yes, it’s finally done. I can hardly believe it myself. Looking back over the posts in this series it’s taken around 5 months of on-again, off-again work. Although, a lot of that time was spent thinking about how to solve particular problems. And there was a bit of an intimidation thing going on. I didn’t want to screw up, or do wrong by an E. L. Moore model. It’s the only one I’m likely to ever work on, so, no pressure :-) But, it’s been a great experience for me and I’ve learned a lot. Anyway, let's move on to the last few things that had to be finished on the diorama.

The main brick building still has the light E. L. Moore installed in the clerestory. The wires run out through holes in the floor and then are bent sideways and out through those two little holes at the bottom of the back wall. 

You can see that one wire is broken. I soldered some extensions to both, but instead of running them out to power through the back wall, I simply drilled a hole in the diorama and ran them out the bottom of the building.

Mr. Moore used the same idea on the other half, but the internal lights were long gone. The holes for the wires in the back wall were still there though.

To light the multi-unit complex I inserted a small LED strip into the bottom. You can see in this picture that the wires were run out through the bottom of the diorama and then through the side frame.

In this photo you can see the lighting wires for both buildings protruding through holes drilled in the diorama side frame.

I hooked the lights up to a couple of 9v batteries for this photo. The LED lighting is rather subtle given that the widows in the multi-unit complex are frosted.

It wasn't until I got the diorama all put together that I realized that it's got lots of potential for staging scenes. 

To finish off the fencing I needed to the build the gates over the track. In this photo I've glued up the frames and inserted them over the track to test the fit before gluing on the fencing.

The gates are hinged so they can be opened and closed. To make the hinges I folded a strip of paper into an L-shape and coloured it aluminum with a Sharpie pen. A couple of short pieces were cut from the strip and then glued to the gate ends and fence posts.

Here are the gates after the hinges are glued in place and the balsa pieces have been stained with some thin dark brown acrylic paint.

The next task was to install the 'pipes' that cross over the tracks from the shack and into the brick building.

In the upper right area, just above the roof, you can see the very small holes that E. L. Moore drilled into the brick building for the pipes.

The wire needed is very fine indeed. To figure out what diameter was required, I inserted drill bits into the holes until I found the one with just the right diameter for a snug fit. I then bought some piano wire of the same diameter.

Mr. Moore's design bent the pipes in a very flat V-shape. I found that with such a shape, I couldn't get the the right clearance for boxcars to roll cleanly underneath, so I went for a slightly more elevated design. 

All that was left to do was anchor the smokestack guy-wires around the property. Each thread had a balsa stake attached, and that stake was glued to the diorama base. A pair of tweezers was used to hold each stake down and its weight applied the small amount of tension to the thread to kept it taut while the glue dried.

I'm happy with the way it turned out. It looked a little shabby - although in good structural condition - after 3 decades in storage, but it seems to have weathered the years quite well.

Modern digital photograph helps to show how good these old models were. Although not fine scale, they would look quite at home on many of today's layouts.

Well, it looks ok as long as you don't look too closely at the back walls :-) The multi-unit complex never had complete metal paneling applied to it's rear wall.

Well, that's that. Please close the gates on your way out.

HOJPOJ Reno: Cover letter and manuscript

I was a very happy fellow Friday because I finally came across the cover letter used to sell the HOJPOJ Manufacturing Company project and the typewritten manuscript. 

December 27, 1967

H. H. Carstens, Editor

Railroad Model Craftsman,

Ramsey, N. J.

Hooby-hooby and hub-hub . . .  Christmas is out of the way for another year.

Here’s the Hojpoj Manufacturing Company with a water tower -- can’t recall having seen anything on modeling a water tower.

I’ll try to find something simpler next. Any ideas?

Kinda thinking of building myself a railroad. Wouldn’t consider anything of any size as that would entail a bit of work. So . . .  card table size. Has to be simple to be in line with my thinking. N scale. Gotta plan drawn up, loop-de-loop, trestle, tunnels, mountains and lake, with just a couple of sidings. Intrigued with this little HOn21/2 stuff -- run both it and N scale stuff with some compromises, maybe TT buildings or between in foreground, N in background. Trouble is I’ll never know whether to reach for HO, TT or N ruler. Low cost project for beginner -- ought to be a little fun, and maybe the real reason is I like to dabble in scenery occasionally.

Hope your Creative Crafts thing is doing well.

Keep the steam up . . . . 

signed E. L. Moore

E. L. Moore

525 Oakland Ave., Apt 3

Charlotte, N. C.

Well, well, well. Not much about the HOJPOJ, but an interesting proposal for what would become the three-part, Enskale and Hoentee layout series that ran in the October, November and December 1968 issues of Railroad Model Craftsman. This is the layout that featured, among things, an N-scale version of his Grizzly Flats Depot - well, it turns out that after he built a simplified version, he decided not to use it because it was too small compared to the other buildings.

Also, it’s an interesting reversal of opinion on layout building. In an August 1966 letter to Mr. Carstens he has this to say on layouts,

You and Crosby both have problems. He’s beginning on his “layout of a lifetime” so damned full of ideas he has to have a filing clerk to keep track of his ideas. I built one railroad, only 4’ x 6’ and I have no intentions of ever building another. It was fun, but I get even more fun outa building buildings. Now me, I’m probably the only railroader without a problem or a worry.

The 4’ x 6’ layout he was referring to was his Elizabeth Valley Railroad. I’m going to speculate a bit, so don’t take this too seriously: I think what he liked about layouts were the trains, scenery, buildings, atmosphere and the stories they can embody, and he wasn’t that interested in wiring and control and simulating business operations and empire building. He was a romantic, not a formalist. In today’s world, I think he’d have more interest in compact UK style layouts, and less in room and basement sized North American style operation oriented pikes. But, I as I said, that’s all speculation on my part.

HOJPOJ Reno: Storage tank and shack

Just across the tracks from the main complex is a small storage tank and shack. There are pipes - modelled by wires - which run from the brick building, over the tracks, and into the shack roof. I guess inside the shack are some valves and things for controlling whatever is flowing in those pipes. This is another part of the HOJPOJ build that has not survived the ages, so I built a new one.

The shack is built up from scraps of balsa and then surfaced with E. L. Moore's tried-and-true 'paper' metal technique.

This method involves making a tool with a ridged pattern that resembles corrugated metal, placing a sheet of paper on it, and scribing the pattern into the paper with a pencil, dried-out pen, or sharp stick. I had made a pattern back when I was building Bunn's Feed and Seed and thought I had stashed it away somewhere in the workshop. I searched for a couple of weeks but couldn't find it :-( So, I went ahead and made another. My new pattern, like my old one, is made from curved plastic pieces, suitably flattened, leftover from an HO-scale quonset hut kit that were super-glued to a piece of wood. You can see it in the upper left in the above picture.

In this picture I've taped a piece of paper - I pulled a sheet from my computer's printer - and have started scribing with a pencil. Use a low angle to keep the pencil tip from pushing through the paper. Over on the right you can see a piece of bamboo skewer that I also tried as an embossing tool - it works fine too!

The roof panels are a little different. For these, only scribe every 4th line. 

Once the paper is scribed, 4' x 8' panels are cut out and these are then glued onto the balsa walls. For this, I just use an ordinary household white glue. 

And here it is, all done! I tried to make it look a little more haphazard by varying the lengths of the paper panels. It's ready to be painted with some acrylic aluminum coloured paint.

The tank was built around a discarded aspirin bottle. It turns out this one is just the right diameter as the original at 11', but is only 17' long compared to the original's 21'. Not a big difference. 

The narrow opening was cut off with a razor saw and circles of 1/16" balsa sheet were then glued on each end. At this point I hunkered down to finish the model and didn't take any photos along the way. But, basically, the bottle is wrapped with construction paper, and the hatch on the top is built up from a section of styrene tube topped with a thin, styrene disk and a sprue stub - yes, styrene again, the anti-Moore material :-) Well, look at it this way, he was economical and used things he had on hand instead of spending money when he didn't have to. I did the same.

The tank is supported by four little balsa wedges that simulate concrete blocks. The tank is painted with a number of loose washes of several greys, white, aluminum and black. After the shack was painted with a base of aluminum, it was washed with a thin neutral grey, and then a gloppy rust mixture. After painting the shack and the tank were glued together to form a single unit.

Once the model is on the diorama, some holes will be drilled into the shack's roof for the delivery pipes, and a support arm for them will be added to the front of the shack.

HOJ POJ Reno: The Water Tower

[Fitting the braces to the legs calls for a little agility.

E. L. Moore commenting - with considerable understatement - on the most difficult part of the HOJ POJ water tank project in his Railroad Model Craftsman article of April 1968.

Amen brother.

J. D. Lowe commenting on the comment.]

The HOJ POJ project included an onsite water tower near the main complex. That model wasn’t one I saw at the meet-up, and wasn’t part of the HOJ POJ remnants, so I decided to build one for the diorama as per the instructions in E. L. Moore’s article.

I must say that if you want to build a water tower for some other purpose, I wouldn’t build one according to this article. This isn’t meant as a slight against the original, just that there are kits and modern scratch building techniques that will produce a somewhat more realistic water tower with less work. I built it completely old school because I want it to fit in with the style of the complex.

I found it to be a finicky project. It took me a long time and I wanted to give up on a few occasions :-( I’d guess and say it uses some laborious construction techniques from the ‘50s and my 21^st century mouse-sized attention span couldn’t handle them :-) I’m sure in the hands of a master like E. L. Moore, this project isn’t too bad, but for me, it was tricky. In the end, the structure is ok, but not great. Anyway, if after all my grumblings you still want to give it a go, let’s get started.

The whole project is built around a humble fishing bobber from the 1950's. Luckily I had a couple and used a very damaged one for this project

Mr. Moore says he removed the central shaft and replaced it with a long 1/8" diameter stick that models the water pipe and provides some structural stiffness to the assembled model. The shaft wouldn't come out of this bobber so I cut most of it off. I eventually learned that it also wasn't square to the body, so I had to cut off that remaining stub shown in the picture.

The tank body, whose diameter is the same as the widest diameter of the bobber, is rolled and glued up from a piece of construction paper. An inside stiffener is cut from 1/16" balsa.

The construction paper tube is slipped over the bobber and glued in place. It fits quite snugly. 

The balsa stiffener is then dabbed with glue along its perimeter and pushed into the end of the tank. It's quite a solid little structure once the glue is dry.

The roof is made from a circular disc of construction paper that is sliced to its centre so it can be shaped into a cone.

Two nested, smaller cones are glued inside the main roof cone. E. L. Moore recommends using three internal cones, but I found two made for a sufficiently stiff roof.

Here's the built-up, painted and lettered tank. The roof apex has a decoration inserted that was carved from a round toothpick. The whole thing was painted aluminum and the lettering was from some very old rub-on transfers from '70s. This version of the tank still has the straight-up final J that eventually got scraped off replaced with a skewed one.

I must admit that my assembly sequence was goofy. If I were to do it again I'd paint the construction paper first and then apply the letters before rolling it into a tube. 

On next to building the girder legs. The first thing I did was cut 8 strips, 3/32" wide from 1/32" thick sheet balsa stock.

The next thing to do is glue on some spacers, cut a scale 1' long from 1/16" balsa. Do this to 4 of the strips, then glue on the remaining strips to create 4 built-up legs.

Here are the half finished legs. The next step is to wrap each leg with diagonal bracing cut from paper. 

I took a sheet of paper from the computer's printer and sliced off 8 thin strips.They were coloured black with a Sharpie pen.

Gluing these strips in place made me a little nutty, but once I got the hang of it, it wasn't too bad. First, glue a strip on a girder end at 45 degrees to the balsa. Let it dry, then start wrapping it up the leg.

It's a little hard to tell from this photo, but the trick is to make the spiral loops equally spaced at about 1/2" between each loop. Once you've made a loop, dab some glue on the paper, press it to the leg and move onto wrapping the next loop. After awhile it becomes second nature. Each leg is wrapped with two strips, spiralling in opposite directions. After the glue was dried, there was a bit of touch-up with black paint to hide small glue smears and missed spots on the legs.

The spirals on the leftmost leg aren't too tight. It was the first one I tried, but I decided to use it anyway. I made it one of the back legs. It doesn't look too bad on the finished model - not noticeable. I think it's because everything is painted black. That hides a lot of imperfections.

Once the legs were done, next came the tank platform. Two donut shaped pieces were cut from 1/32" balsa and glued together with the grains perpendicular.

It too was painted black and then slipped onto the tank.

The railing was drawn out on a piece of overhead transparency film with a Sharpie pen. I made it a little longer than the perimeter of the tank platform so there'd be a gluing edge.

It's a little tricky to get it snug to the platform, but, alls-well-that-ends-well.

At this point I went crazy. I figured I could stand the tank unit up on the four legs, coax them into position, slather on some glue, and voila ! it would be standing up and all I'd have to do is glue the cross-braces to the legs. Oaths were sworn. Glue was glopped. Nerves were frazzled. But, gravity was not defied. Time for plan B. I drew up a template and glued cross-braces to pairs of legs. They were 1/32" strips sliced from a 1/32" thick balsa sheet.

The night dragged on. Braces were cut. The glue dried slowly. 

With shaky hands, and a lack of concern about focusing the camera, the tank was hoisted up on the braced leg pairs and magic occurred ! It stood up. And it was square and straight! The age of miracles is not over!

A couple days later I added the wood frame cover around where the water pipe should be and started gluing the remaining lower leg braces in place. That did a lot to stiffen the overall structure. E. L. Moore made the braces from balsa strips and metal wire. I'm not sure why the mix, but I speculate that's what he had on hand, so that's what he used. The bracing on the upper third is simply thread zig-zagged through the legs, so I did that too. That was the last step.

Ok, well, not quite. I glued a styrene ladder on the left front leg. I ran out of ladder stock and didn't have any left to build the tank ladder to the roof - I'll see what I can find at the local hobby store. But, other than that, it's ready to add to the diorama.