The E. L. Moore Files: Jones Chemical Co.

[My rendition of E. L. More's Jones Chemical Co.]

E. L. Moore’s Jones Chemical Co. project appeared in the March ’74 issue of Model Railroader. It was the next E. L. Moore article they published after his Bunn’s Feed and Seed in the Aug ’73 issue, and it was the next project of his that I tried to build back in the ‘70s.  I tried it again when I got back into the hobby a few years ago.

My eyes popped out when I saw the cover letter that Mr. Moore wrote to Model Railroader to introduce this article. It’s basically just a bawdy, Benny Hill-esque story. Yeap, you read that right. I won’t transcribe it here as I don’t want to test the Google net-nannies, but you can read it for yourself in the scan of the letter if you’re game. Actually, a lot of stuff anyone can see on prime-time tv these days is saucier than what he wrote.

[E. L. Moore's cover letter to his Jones Chemical Co. article]

Model Railroader’s rather terse response says it all, but they did buy the article and paid him $120; $20 more than for his last one, Bunn’s Feed and Seed. I rather like the letterhead that Model Railroader used at that time. It’s classy in an understated way.

[Model Railroader's acceptance letter]

The manuscript and the published article are more or less the same. Unlike Bunn’s Feed and Seed where the entire fictional story around the project got edited out, only a small portion of the  Jones story about the precariously balanced, little roof-top shack got sliced. For completeness, here’s the story snippet:

"Hey ! Whats about that little house up there on the roof?" asked Eddie.

"A good question. I've never been quite sure, myself," I said. "Could be a watchman's shanty, or maybe a chemical engineer has to be in attendance, I just don't know."

"Or maybe the plant doesn't have indoor toilet facilities," suggested Eddie.

"If it's that, it has to be chemically operated I'll wager," I said.

The story-let suggests to me that the little shack was a way to slip one of his classic outhouse builds into a mainstream project. That might have been a no-no to the editors of a family-oriented magazine. With the article’s story mentioning that bawdy records were part of the payment for the build, the nature of the cover letter story, and the hinted at roof-top outhouse, maybe the entire Jones build was a disguised off-colour joke. Stranger things have happened. I’m curious to see what’s in the manuscripts to come.

Streetcars along St. Clair Ave. W.

We were in Toronto over the weekend. For a few minutes on Saturday afternoon I had the opportunity to be a streetcar nerd and take a few pictures of some members of the TTC fleet running along St. Clair Ave. W., around the 700 block.

It was unusually cold at -5C, with a 30 kph wind blowing, and that's why everybody at the Christie stop is bundled up in their winter coats. The shelters, overhead wire, dedicated lanes for the streetcars, along with the other infrastructure is fairly modern on this section of the TTC system.

This view from the middle of a crosswalk gives a good view of the overhead. While the streetcar was on its way I took some pictures of a couple of nearby buildings.

This is the apartment at 680 St. Clair Ave. W. Not everything has been razed in this part of town to make way for condos. 

However, many buildings have been gentrified. To me that's better than letting them fall to rack-and-ruin. I like the windows on this Starbucks and I'm glad to see the building being used.

Here's the streetcar at the light. I moved out of the way to the island. 

Last photo of the afternoon on our way to a non-streetcar part of the city.

How to layout the Grizzly Flats dormer

Soon after posting the Grizzly Flats build a few months ago, a reader asked if I could post about the math for laying out the dormer roof. In his article, E. L. Moore gave a template for the dormer in HO-scale. Unfortunately, I made my N-scale bay window a little bigger than the plan, so I couldn't just shrink Mr. Moore's template down to N-scale and expect it to fit. I had to dust off a little of my high school geometry and draw a new one. It 's a bit boring, so I didn't post it then, but it can be useful for future scratchbuilt projects.

[Geometry of the basic roof shape.]

The thing to focus on is the basic shape of the roof and worry about the fancy cut-out later. Also, I haven't been in school for a long time, so my approach to the problem and its notation is probably old fashioned, so please bear with me. The key is to recognize where the right-angled triangles are, and then apply the Pythagorean theorem (that is, the square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides).

I should note that L (the width of the roof at the eaves) and h (the height to the peak from the eaves) can be measured from your building plans. W (the width of the dormer at the eaves) is something you prescribe. As I noted, because I didn't use the value of W that E. L. Moore noted in his plan, I had to recalculate x, y, and z.

That shaded triangle in the drawing is the one whose sides need to be calculated. It's a right-angled triangle, and so are the two triangles that make up the front face of the dormer. 

Once you've calculated the side lengths, x, y, and z, draw them on the material you're using to build the dormer and remember that x and y are perpendicular to each other. That'll give you a basic shape for the dormer roof panels. To accommodate the sloped, triangular cut-out in the dormer roof like the Grizzly Flats station has, just measure back along x and y from the 90-degree angle while you've got the panels on your drawing board. 

Flexity on a Flat car

A TTC Flexity streetcar is shown being transported to the National Research Council's Centre for Surface Transportation in July '13 for cold weather testing. The greenery appears to have been very lush that day. Along with the contrast between the ratty old diesel and the shiny new streetcar, this would make an interesting scene to model.

E. L. Moore’s Legacy in the 21st Century: HOJ-half-POJ

[Photo of the prototype derived portion of E. L. Moore's HOJPOJ MRG. CO. project. Photo used courtesy of the owner.]

E. L. Moore built a manufacturing complex called the HOJPOJ. MFG. CO. - which I believe is meant to be pronounced, ‘Hodgepodge Manufacturing Company’ - that appeared in the April 1968 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. Recently, half of that model has been found, and what’s left is shown in the lead photo. 

Mr. Moore drops a couple of clues in his article about the prototype and its whereabouts: there’s a photo of part of it in the article, but the only discernible signage is the partial ‘BARNHA’ and ‘MFG.’ printed high up on the water tower, and there's his opening comment that “...this factory is only a few minutes walk from where I live...” My friend Google tells me it’s actually a 14 minute walk.

[Walking route from E. L. Moore's residence to Barnhardt Manufacturing via Google Maps.]

Putting the pieces together, the prototype was most likely the Barnhardt Manufacturing Company that is located on 1100 Hawthorne Lane in Charlotte, N.C., around 3/4 of a mile from E. L. Moore’s residence at 525 Oakland Ave. The company website states it was opened for business in 1900 - just as E. L. Moore notes in his article - and grew and expanded and diversified over its long life. 

[What's at the site of the HOJPOJ facility today according to Google Streetviews.]

Now, E. L. Moore’s model isn’t an exact replica as he notes in the text. First, he designed the model’s footprint to fit into a 9 inch by 9 inch area, so there was a lot of selective compression applied, and second, he notes that of the two major parts that make up the model, the two-story main brick building, which is the other half that’s missing in the model photos, is something he made up to “rise above the jumble of units and achieve some sense of balance.” 

[That unfinished wall is where the two-story brick building attaches. Photo courtesy of the owner.]

So, the half shown in these model photos is his interpretation of pieces of the actual Barnhardt Manufacturing facility as it appeared sometime in the mid-1960s, and the half not shown - which the model’s owner informs me he has - is something Mr.  Moore added to make the whole look right. The model is a good example of using a prototype for inspiration, squeezing away the irrelevant stuff with selective compression, and applying some artistic license to pull together a visually interesting and balanced model.

25 April 2016 update: I was given the HOJPOJ and you can read about how it was restored in this series of posts.