E. L. Moore’s Legacy in the 21st Century: Outhouses, backhouses and privies, oh my!

[Private Collection - posted with permission of the owner]

One thing that E. L. Moore liked to build were outhouses, and not just replicas of the usual run-of-the-mill one-holers. No siree. He had a genius for them: two-story jobs, hexagonal plans, ones with wheels, skull shaped (!), and more. 

[Private Collection - posted with permission of the owner]

17 of them were documented in all their glory in A Mighty Relaxin’ Job that appeared in the November 1975 issue of the NMRA Bulletin. I’ll leave it to the Sigmund Freud department to speculate on what it all means, but I’m glad to see that at least one has managed to survive the years: this one dates from 1964.

[Private Collection - posted with permission of the owner]

This example isn't one of his wildest designs, but it's very similar to the one shown in figure #13 in the article. And has a similar caption on the ventilation theme :-)

[Private Collection - posted with permission of the owner]

31March 2016 update: More outhouses can be found here.

Streetcars in Charlotte, North Carolina

E. L. Moore was a resident of Charlotte, North Caroline, but he was "... not a trolley fan...". I'm not a resident of Charlotte, but I am a trolley fan. Whenever a city is new to me, one thing I'm curious about is whether they have, or had, a streetcar system. Charlotte did until 1938, and then had a small historic system from the early 1990's until quite recently. This short PBS video gives a brief history.

The AntiPesto van gets a new temporary home

To all concerned I report that during renovations Wallace took a spill and sustained minor, non-life threatening injuries. After repair he and the AntiPesto were moved to an undisclosed location until their permanent location is readied. More news as it happens. Stay tuned. Film at eleven.

Trains and the formative years of Alberto Santos Dumont

Last weekend Debra and I watched the above PBS Nova episode about the life and work of arguably the greatest aviator of the 20^th century, Alberto Santos Dumont. The show is excellent with lots of photos and film footage I hadn’t seen before. One point that was left out, but was noted in Nancy Winter’s biography of Dumont, Man Flies, was that he honed his formidable engineering skills by helping to run and maintain the railroad that ran on his father’s coffee plantation in Brazil. Winter's noted that it had 60 miles of track and included this picture.

Blue Gecko Records' Recording Studio

Lately I’ve been spending most of my free time on house renovations. I didn’t want to work on any complex modelling projects in what time I had left over, so I thought I’d finally have a go at working on an idea for a small building that used some Mexican tiles I’d been saving. 

I bought them at Casa Lucia in Bloomfield a couple of summers ago when Debra and I visited Prince Edward County. I liked their look and size, and they only cost 50 cents each, so I bought a few. At the time I wasn’t sure what I’d use them for, but they looked like they might be good for some sort of HO scale walls. 

Eventually I settled on a simple ‘chocolate-box’ style project, but the parts have been sitting on my workbench waiting for me to get around to them. Now seemed like a good time. This isn’t a model, just a small building that is close to HO scale that’ll eventually be part of the street scene on the Lost Ocean Line.