Train Song performed by Holly Cole

Glenn Gould, "I’m a bit of a railway buff I guess.”

Although pre-VIA Rail trains feature throughout this show, serious train talk and Gould's admission begins around the 4:55 mark. Both the talk and visuals are impressive. One comment of Gould's at around the 6:30 mark I found particularly interesting was in his introduction to the surveyor W. "Wally" V. Maclean:

"In the course of a day long conversation when we first met he [JDL: Wally] tried to explain to me the metaphorical significance, as he saw it, of his profession. He sort of parlayed surveying into a literary tool in the same way that Jorge Luis Borges manipulates mirrors and Franz Kafka badgers beetles and as he did so I realized that his relation to this craft, which has as its subject the land, enabled him to read the signs of the land, and enabled him to find within the particular a suggestion of the infinite, and vice versa I suppose.”

The other parts of the show can be found at these links:

    Part 2

    Part 3

    Part 4

Separated at birth?

VIA's Venture (by Bachmann in this case :-) ):

The Ventures:

When the cuttin' was done the only part that wasn't foamy ...

 ... were the soles of the small man's feet.

Well, they were a bit foamy too if the trail of foam bits going up the basement stairs and into the house are anything to go by.

After I vacuum the carpeting I'm going to switch gears and alternate between making and installing rock castings and shaping the foam structure. I was thinking this would be a better approach as the final shape will develop more iteratively, which I think will result in a more interesting mountain.

Let's start the weekend with a little vacuuming music:

Running back to Bill Schopp

Vince alerted me to these 2 excellent videos by Tom Pierpoint about customizing brass locomotives. It's very impressive stuff.

Interestingly both make a tip-of-the-hat to Bill Schopp and his legendary loco customization projects.

The other thing that's been on my mind this week is The Guess Who. When I was in Austin recently I got into a long discussion about this and that in a record store with my friend's cousin. Somehow we got onto the topic of The Guess Who and their early 2000s Running Back Thru Canada tour. Since I've returned I've gotten all nostalgic and have been playing the videos from that show. There should be no doubt that Winnipeg is the great music city of Canada.

EVRR-body's doin' The Loco-Motion

Gil Mellé's sound and light device

Sound & light device by Gil Mellé; RMC Mar '62

It appears that Gil Mellé was starting to experiment with electronic music in 1959 and 1960. I wondered if there was any spillover into his model railroading work. All I could find was an article called Easy to Build Sound Light Unit in the March 1962 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman.

As the article's title says, the device creates sound and lighting effects, and can be inserted in just about any HO scale industrial model to give it an extra dose of realism. The article notes it generates sawing or grinding noises, erratic hammering noises, the sounds of motors, regular interior lighting, sparks of light as if coming from welding or grinding equipment, and diffuse light. Interestingly it isn't an electronic device, but an electro-mechanical one, in the spirit of those that can be found in Adolph Frank's Animated Scale Models Handbook.

Gil Mellé tries styrene

Top: Tie Plant, RMC Apr '65; Bottom: Arch Bridge, RMC June '65

This model was built of styrene, requiring somewhat different techniques from the wood construction I normally employ ... Styrene is an interesting and different medium for the modeler. It works easily, is far superior to cardboard and has a surface, when desired, that gives the closest appearance to steel possible. It can be bent, cut, sanded, scribed, and scored with ease; and assembles with styrene cement. If you haven't worked with styrene, Kemtron's handbook by Alan Armitage is must reading.

So states Gil Mellé in what appears to be his first published scratchbuilding project that makes use of styrene, Build a Tie Treating Creosote Plant, in the April 1965 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. The project consists of a simple structure and a complicated piece of rolling stock. It's an interesting coincidence that E. L. Moore's first and only foray into using styrene also involved building rolling stock. In his article, Easy Narrow Gauge Coach that appeared in the March '69 issue of RMC Moore uses styrene to convert an N-scale AHM mine car to an HO-2-1/2 coach that ended up looking a lot like the Spumoni Club Coach. 

Mellé carries on with another styrene project in the article Scratchbuild a Styrene Arch Bridge that appeared in the June 1965 issue of RMC. As well as restating his position on styrene he made in his previous styrene-based project, he adds a little more about how Al Armitage fits into the styrene story:

Much of the exploratory work in styrene scratchbuilding was done by Al Armitage, recently appointed as director of design research at Kemtron Corporation. Al knows model building well, since he was formally with Northeastern Scale Models, Revell, and Kadee. Al also authored Kemtron's book on styrene which I must strongly recommend to anyone who has not yet done any work with this material. 

What was Gil Mellé doing in 1959?

1959 has been noted by many as one of the greatest years in jazz history, maybe the greatest.

If you look online you'll see a lot of lists of great jazz albums that were released in 1959. Some lists have up to 10 albums, and those 10 can vary from list to list, but the 4 albums showcased in the video are in them all. They all agree though that 1959 was a golden year for jazz regardless of what gems are picked.

I’d like to say that 1959 was also a blockbuster year in model railroading. It doesn’t appear to be, but there were a few important articles published in Model Railroader that showcased important directions in the hobby for scratchbuilders, especially for those interested in structures and scenery like Mellé:

The Strathmore Story, William J. Clouser, Feb ’59

Laminated Styrofoam Scenery, William E. Eckhardt, Sept ’59

The case for styrene (Part 1), Alan B. Armitage, Nov ’59

The case for styrene (Part 2 - Conclusion), Alan B. Armitage, Dec ’59

So what was Gil Mellé doing in 1959? 

In Aaron Steinberg’s interesting 2002 JazzTimes interview with Gil Mellé there’s this intriguing paragraph that appears in a discussion of where Mellé’s music and painting careers were going in the mid to late 1950s:

At the same time he was starting to have success with his visual art, his increasingly idiosyncratic music was confusing and shrinking his audience. “Nobody knew what the hell I was doing,” Mellé says. Record sales continued to lag with each recording. Then Mellé did something that made things much, much worse. “That’s the point at which I got into electronic music. Then [my audience] really didn’t understand me. Electronic music in ’59? That wasn’t music.”

Elektar, 1960; Source: JazzTimes

Intriguing and infuriating. That’s the only mention of 1959 in the article, and the implication, ok, well, more than an implication, an outright statement from Mellé that he was seriously experimenting with electronic music in 1959. As well, in the pictures accompanying the article there’s a photo of a device called an ‘Elektar’ dated 1960. What is it? A guitar amplifier? Some sort of electronic guitar simulation device? Something else? It’s infuriating that the article doesn’t discuss any of the devices shown in the pictures. I know nothing about the roots of electronic music beyond a taste for Switched-On Bach, but, if I take the interview at face value, Mellé was working on electronic musical devices in 1959, and his first appears to be one called the ‘Elektar’, which was made in 1960. 

We also know from ads in 1958 and 1959 issues of Model Railroader that Mellé was running his model structures company, Industrial Model Works, at the same time he was experimenting with electronic music. Then later in 1960 his first articles in Railroad Model Craftsman were published. So, it looks like it was a very creative period for Mellé. Maybe he was at work on his paintings too? Now, maybe Mellé’s apparent musical sabbatical in New Jersey is not as well known as Sonny Rollins 1959 to 1961 one where he famously practiced his saxophone out on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge everyday, but like Rollins, there was something developing.

You’ve got to take the above with a grain-of-salt. I do. I’ve corroborated nothing. So far it’s just a string of interesting factoids, with the emphasis on interesting, and lots of questions about their factualness. In other words, the search continues. 

Gil Mellé on mines, breakfast, classical music and jazz

Snipped from larger image here.

 As you’ve gathered if you’ve studied some of my previous articles, I’m a nut on mines and feel that mining and railroads go together much like ham ’n eggs, Stravinski [sic] and Bernstein, or Thalonius [sic] Monk and way out jazz.

The first sentence from the first part of Gil Mellé’s January 1964 RMC article, Mountain Flotation Plant.

Yes, that's the flotation plant with Gil Mellé in the photo.

Gil Mellé's Los Angeles projects

Mellé's drawing of cleaning equipment in SP's Taylor Engine Terminal, RMC Dec'65

In 1965 Gil Mellé had 3 articles published in RMC about building various types of structures he observed on trip(s) to rail equipment servicing facilities and yards in the Los Angeles area. The articles are:

Los Angeles Junction Diesel Shed, May ’65

Diesel Fuel Tank, July ’65

SP Parts Servicing Depot, December ’65

I particularly like the opening to the Dec ’65 article:

For anyone who has been a rail fan for a long time as I have, nothing could be more rewarding than the five mile trip I recently took through the Los Angeles yard area of the SP. Perched atop a flat car I was immediately made aware of the space age changes that were present everywhere. I saw freight cars of mammothian proportions and unfamiliar design! Mentally I tried to see them negotiate a tight radius and (in error I’m sure) I doubted that they could. In some cases the weird designs were dictated by the very nature of what they must transport. There was an interlocking tower that more closely resembled a home for alien life than a yardmaster and his assistants. I’d like to do an article on that concrete beauty in the near future but for now shall describe how you can duplicate an operation on the SP that was installed a few years ago.

Various online biographies seem a bit vague on when Mellé relocated from New Jersey to Los Angeles and re-entered the music business. Based on my experience with E. L. Moore's articles, it appears that RMC would publish articles within a few months after their receipt, so I speculate that maybe Mellé relocated as early as 1964 and appears to have been there in 1965. I guess these articles could have been merely the result of a visit to Los Angeles, but hopefully I can find some corroborating evidence in the future. For whatever reason, he seems to have had his feet in LA in either '64 or '65.

The Dec ’65 article appears to be his last; however, that opening paragraph teases the reader with the spectre of a future article on the interlocking tower. I’m going to take another look and see if that article did materialize, and if there are others I might have overlooked.

Black spray

Black spray: A technique for unifying the overall hue of a layout by over spraying with a mist of flat black spray paint. 

Usage: Hal decided to black spray his layout a few days before the magazine photographer arrived.

Source: Gil Mellé appears to be the original source of this technique, and described it in his September 1963 Railroad Model Craftsman article, Scenery to Improve Your Layout. Mellé notes:

Have you ever looked at your entire layout and noticed that some parts of it seem to stand out in an unsatisfactory way. After two years of work every individual component looked satisfactory but when the whole of my layout was viewed it was not [sic] anything but a harmonious integration……Here’s what I did to correct this. It took two minutes, a spray can of flat black and a track cleaner……I covered my entire layout with a mist of the stuff. I aimed above everything so that the minuscule particles of wet paint would fall on everything as soot issued from the fiery stack of an iron horse, is hurled sky high and deposited on everything around. Of course the walls around the pike were protected with newspapers taped in place……It worked!

The technique strikes this editor as a bold and unforgiving one with serious consequences if not properly executed.

from The Dictionary of Non-Existent Model Railroad Terms, 2nd ed., 1999.

Did Gil Mellé invent kit-mingling in 1963?

Top: Mellé's lumber yard; Bottom: Curren's

I'm now rereading Gil Mellé's 1963 Railroad Model Craftsman articles. In the April issue I stumbled across the kitbashed project shown in the top half of the photo on the left, his so-called Split Level Lumber Yard. I immediately felt some deja vu. It was Art Curren's Artz Lumber Co. in his 1988 book, Kitbashing HO Model Railroad Structures, I was remembering. 

Mellé's project made use of Atlas' then relatively new #750 Lumber Yard and Office kit and #704 Signal Tower kit, with the #801 Street Light kit thrown in for some extra detail. Curren's used 3 of the #750s and an AHM #15303 American farmhouse kit.

Art Curren preferred to call what he did kit-mingling instead of the more commonly used term kitbashing, which the publisher of his book used in the title. I think kit-mingling is more accurate, and I prefer it, but the market is what the market is.

Interestingly Mellé doesn't use any special terms to refer to what he's doing other than noting the resulting model is a hybrid and a customization:

This month I shall proceed to show a new plastic kit trick. In previous articles I’ve shown you how to customize many of the plastic buildings currently available. This time, if you want to try your hand we’ll not only do that but we’ll also throw another kit into the batch and really come up with a hybrid.

But, just look at the picture up there. The model is clearly a species that much later would be referred to as kit-mingled. Did Gil Mellé invent kit-mingling? Maybe not. I'd have to read back more into the late 1950s and early 1960s to know for certain. However, he clearly was one of its early practitioners.  

Gil Mellé's Lost Years: A beginning

With the Malcolm Furlow post I’ve started to think again about some of the lost - or maybe just under appreciated - roots of model railroading. I’ll get back to Furlow, but I’ve been wondering again about Gil Mellé because of something Furlow wrote.

There’s about a 10 year period from 1957 to 1967 where Mellé recorded and released no records, but as readers here know he was becoming a major presence in model railroading. The various biographies I’ve been able to find online don’t go into what he was up to during those years. Maybe there’s something in print. I’m thinking of putting together an integrated timeline that shows his transition from jazz musician to model railroader to musician again. I'll combine whatever I find music-wise with his model railroading publication list.

I noted Malcolm Furlow wrote that he believed going into model railroading was a “natural extension of my music career”. I wonder if Gil Mellé thought the same, or maybe he entered model railroading for different reasons? I wonder if, like Tom Daniel, railroading was an early interest, and Mellé for some similar reasons decided to return to it? Maybe I’ll never find out, but maybe there are some clues out there.

So, timeline. It looks like the last album Mellé recorded and released before his long hiatus from music was Quadrama in 1957. The album is on the Prestige label, # PRLP 7097. On it he plays baritone sax. I don’t own the album, but I’m trying to track down either an LP or CD for a reasonable price. Although, on YouTube I did find this recording of the piece Quadrama, that Wikipedia tells me is the very last track on the Quadrama album.

The last track of the last album before hiatus. Significant? I doubt it, but I don’t know. Here it is for your listening pleasure: 

Malcolm Furlow, Photographer/Modeler

Furlow centre spread from A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos

My love affair with model photography began during the summer of 1978. Up until that time I was a professional musician traveling throughout the United States, playing Reno, Tahoe, Vegas, and a host of other, lesser-known watering holes.

As I look back on what seemed a strange transition at the time (becoming a photographer/modeler), I have now come to regard my entry into this creative field as a natural extension of my music career.

From Malcom Furlow’s introduction to his chapter, Performing the art of illusion, in Kalmbach’s 1991 book, A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos.

Furlow’s thought that his move from being a working musician to a photographer/modeler was a perfectly natural career development is quite interesting, but I’ll leave the discussion of the link between model railroading and music to another time as it’s Furlow as photographer I want to take a look at.

In my last attempt to write something on Furlow to mark his passing I detoured onto E. L. Moore street. I guess that happened as my connection to Furlow’s work isn’t that strong. Although he was a prolific and influential modeller, I didn’t build any of his model projects or layouts. When he was at his peak in the model railroading press, I wasn’t active in the hobby, just a sometime reader of magazines. 

What I did appreciate at the time, and continued to appreciate over the years, was his skill as a photographer. He was that rare breed who could create a miniature scene, light it, and then capture it on film in such a way that you believed it was real and you were there, in it and a part of it. I think the majority of model railroaders aren’t able to photographically capture the excitement they feel about their layouts. It’s only a few who can, and those photos energize and change their own work as well as inspire others to improve theirs too. This is a group that includes John Allen, John Ahern, E. L. Moore, Dave Frary, John Olson, Paul Scoles, Ben King, and many others whose use of photography as an inspirational tool has changed the hobby as much as any hands-on modelling technique.

When Furlow was active in the hobby in the 1980s and 1990s I gather he often took a lot of flak, sometimes personal, from more tradition-oriented constituencies and that was one of the reasons he left model railroading for an extended period. Apparently his work was accused of being a John Allen derivative, that he was an imposter, and his approach and view was out-of-step with the real prototype and operations wings of the hobby. I recall reading somewhere that Furlow said he was indeed inspired by John Allen’s work, but was his work derivative? I don’t think so. Again, from his writings, it appears John Allen’s work was one source of inspiration, but his love and affinity with the western and southwestern US was more influential. One of the hobby’s characteristics that accounts for its ongoing popularity is that it has many facets: the ability to simulate railroad business operations, electronics & control, historical modelling, scenery construction, structure building, a wide range of scales and layout sizes, and so on. Conflicts can arise when a large constituency has formed around one of those facets and believes it represents the ‘correct’ way to engage with the hobby, which is no different than lots of other activities in life. 

For me though, it was Furlow's photographs that I remember and admire. I still hope I can achieve even just a fraction of his technical mastery and skill at visual storytelling. If you can find a copy of A Treasury of Model Railroad Photos, buy it. Yes, the photographic techniques it discusses are from the film era, but the photos themselves, text from the authors, and the setups are timeless.

Skipper: Trolley & Sax Man

Left: 1st published 1972 | Right: 1st published 1935

I bought these two cartoon compilations in the summer and dipped into them now-and-then whenever I needed some laughs - which was often. I still frequently pull Toonerville Trolley off the shelf for emergency use :-)

Railway Ribaldry was the first one I bought. It's a 2014 reprint of cartoonist William Heath Robinson's 1935 book that was published to commemorate the centenary of the Great Western Railway. It's full of debonair and droll railway boffin humour. I especially like the ways Robinson often used the page as a design element.

Skipper wails on his sax

And then there's Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Trolley! It's completely wild and crazy. Feral maybe? It's a bracing contrast to Railway Ribaldry.

The internet tells me that what I think of as the Toonerville Trolley cartoons were actually called Toonerville Folks, or at times, alternatively, The Toonerville Trolley That Meets All The Trains. Whatever the name, it ran in the Chicago Post and in syndication from 1908 to 1955 when Fox retired.

Skipper and his trolley were prominent characters of course, but the cast of characters was vast. The table of contents lists 86!  

The antics of children in the wilds of what was then thought of as an emerging U.S. suburbia - which looks more like the country from where I sit in the over developed 21st century - are prominently featured. 

Remember when vacant lots abounded in our land and kids played on them the year round? Remember when trolley cars crisscrossed every street and some lines ended in the "country"?... Remember when suburbia could be located only a few miles from downtown?

Some introductory thoughts from 1972 to Fontaine Fox's Toonerville Trolley by co-compiler Herb Galewitz.

Ok, this is 30Squares the last I looked, so let's get some highly speculative E. L. Moore connections out of way before I bust. Mr. Moore also had a large cast of characters in his articles. Was that in anyway influenced by the large cast of Toonerville Folks? Not to mention his character naming convention has a Toonerville vibe. And what about that name, Toonerville Folks? Mr. Moore's photography studio, which focused on child portraiture, was called Little Folks Studio. Coincidence? Completely unrelated? The most likely answers are Yes and Yes. But, still, I keep these sorts of things in the back of my mind, and let me tell you they itch back there :-)

Toonerville Folks reached the end of the line on February 9, 1955, when the seventy-year-old Fox retired to Florida. Wisely, neither the Syndicate nor Fox sought a replacement. The "vacant lot" era of American life was disappearing. It was beaten by the population explosion of post-Word War II, suburban developers, and urban blight. Today, seventeen years later, we have "progressed" to professional Little Leagues, artificial grass, and the disappearance of street life. It is enough to make a grown man cry.

Herb Galewitz wraps up his introductory comments on a downbeat.

At least the '70s didn't usher in the end of the saxophone ...

... and I got to wondering, was there any Skipper-style Toonerville Trolley music out there?

I found this piece recorded sometime in 1944 or 1945 by Raymond Scott and his orchestra:

The time period's right, but it sounds a little too smooth. I imagine Skipper belting out something more raucous.

I kept looking and found this 1967 song by The Electric Prunes whose lead singer was ....

... James Lowe. At this point music searching stopped dead as I pondered this strange coincidence. This James Lowe parts his name in the middle. His full name turns out to be Thaddeus James Lowe, a descendent of none other than Thaddeus Lowe who built the Mt. Lowe electric railway, which we've discussed here in the past.

These coincidences are making me dizzy. I think I'll go lie down. Ask Katrinka to wake me when the trolley gets here.

The trolley is actually a mobile jazz club. I wonder if it stops at Baker St.?

A is for Architecture and T is for Train

A is for Architecture, Gerald Budner & Robert Verrall, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

While going through the family history files I inherited from my father I found some of my old school notes. In one Duo-Tang I found a page that indicated I had watched the movie, "A is for Architecture", in my grade 11 architectural design class in May '76. I couldn't remember seeing this movie, so this being the 21st century, it was off to Google to see if I could find it, and I did!

It was released in 1960 by the National Film Board of Canada, and has a very late 1950s cool feeling to it. Watching it again I find the beginning and end the most interesting parts*, not to mention the music, which I'm informed is by Eldon Rathburn. Going back to Google, I found this interesting video called, The Romance of Improvisation in Canada: The Genius of Eldon Rathburn.

And this being 30Squares, there's a connection to trains somewhere in this rambling :-) Apparently the above was taken from the 1952 NFB animated film, The Romance of Transportation in Canada, which at around the 5:50 mark gets into trains.

*Although the end is a little more distressing than interesting. It looks like some old buildings near the Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal are being demolished to make way for a modern pile of concrete. It makes me wonder what new building they were pouring, and if it's still standing?

Dig that funky trackwork

Soon after motorizing the Hong Kong tram I started to wonder about the feasibility a small HO-9 streetcar layout built with Kato's Unitram track. I could have got out the pencils and rulers and measured things to do my wondering, but instead I got out the track and buildings and tram and ran a test. I videoed it and posted some stills back in December. The video seemed a little sterile, but I've recently learned how to add a music track with some of Youtube's fee free audio. So, here's the test, jazzed up with a funky soundtrack :-)

Oh, the test results? Things look good, but the tram is a bit too wide, and two can't pass each other without colliding. Still though, I kind of like the idea. Or, maybe it's just the music :-)

Gil Mellé at the 1960 HIAA Trade Show

Gil Mellé at the 1960 HIAA trade show; RMC Apr '60

The April 1960 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman contains a report on the 1960 Hobby Industry Association of America trade show held in Chicago during February of that year. The article notes that Gil Mellé was there with his company, Industrial Model Works (IMW):

Industrial Model Works' Gil Mille [sic] takes a breather. IMW released 19 new items at the show including old time structures and styrene building material.

Prior to seeing this note I had thought IMW was more-or-less a garage manufacturer, but having a booth at America's premier hobby industry trade show seems to suggest much higher aspirations. 

Recently Updated: More Gil Mellé cartoons from 1961

I didn't trust myself and went back through the 1961 issues of Railroad Model Craftsman and found 7 more Gil Mellé cartoons, as well as 2 Right o' Way Models columns that I had overlooked. The bibliography has been updated. So, there were 15 Gil Mellé cartoons published in '61. I also found 3 other unsigned cartoons that appear to have his style, so maybe the actual total is greater than 15. I think I've found all the '61 cartoons, and feel more confident in looking through the other nearby years for more.

[18 September 2020: It looks like '61 and '62 were the high point for cartoons by Gil Mellé. '63 has none. I'm about to review '64 and '65, but it's looking like cartoonist Bill Baron replaced Gil Mellé sometime in '63.]