Michael Paul Smith, RIP

I was saddened today to learn of the passing of Michael Paul Smith, the creator of Elgin Park. I've greatly admired his work and consider his book Elgin Park: Visual Memories of Midcentury America at 1/24th Scale to be one of the best books written on model building. Our internet age is a strange one. I followed his Flickr stream with great interest and bought his books, and although I never had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman, I still feel a personal loss and that the world has lost a great human being. If you aren't familiar with his work, I suggest you look it up.

ELM Epilogue: Did E. L. Moore get a D- in Structural Engineering?

This refers to E. L. Moore's Car Repair Shed described in the November 1969 RMC (page 34). I was quite intrigued with the model and decided to build one myself. However, I found that Moore's model had rafters spaced 12 feet apart which, in real life, would not be practical as the roof would become "wavy" in a very short time. Hence, my rafters have three foot centers, and the uprights are five feet apart.... From a letter by R. Vergeylen of Quebec and printed in the Safety Valve column of the March 1970 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. Turns out that back in the '70s I wasn't any better. My engine house would have collapsed under the first snowfall....

ELM Epilogue: E. L. Moore, a frustrated Nader Raider?

We note that Ralph Nader has criticized the railroads for dumping toilet wastes over some quarter million miles of railroad right of way. Unlike airplanes and buses, which dump human excrement into chemical tanks for disposal at the destination, most railroad equipment just flushes the waste on the right of way. And, here, all these years, we've clamped down on our beloved E. L. Moore who has been hankering to do a bit on outdoor privies. Moore, an expert on the subject, has made them in many variations, including one made of bricks and another with wagon wheels. So sayeth Harold H. Carstens in the Notes on an Old Timetable column in the March 1970 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman.

Band Car

A couple of weeks ago Vince gave me a copy of a book called Montreal's Electric Streetcars: An Illustrated History of the Tramway Era: 1892 to 1959 by Richard M. Binns, published in 1973 by Railfare Enterprises. It's excellent and I was surprised by what seems like a lot of unique rolling stock. One item is this Band Car. The caption below the photo has this to say: A happy little Car! The MTC Employees' Band had their own travelling bandstand during the early 1900s. One of its final runs was to advertise the "Alexander's Ragtime Band" movie in the early 1930s. Elsewhere near the photo it's stated that: The Band Car was 26 feet long overall by seven feet wide and weighed 15,100 lbs. It was painted light yellow and carried no decoration or lettering. I can imagine an unpowered, narrow-gauge version being built by E. L. Moore for his E & K RR, in the spirit of the Spumoni Club Coach, a powered vehicle that was - inadvertently I admit - built as an unpowered coach. Or, building it as a powered trolley for an electric street railway, would open-up a lot of good stories. And speaking of stories, I leave you with Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Jack Haley, and Ethel Merman....take it away Irv....

ELM Epilogue: The Case of the Photographer's Doppelganger - Solved!

[On the left, E. L. Moore's photographer figure, whose construction he described in Put Your Figures to Work published in the July '57 issue of Model Railroader and appeared in a number of his published photographs - photo from E. L. Moore's archives. On the right is an homage to E. L. Moore's photographer figure built by Bob Hayden from a Revell figure - photo courtesy of Dave Frary (the original was in colour; I created this trimmed black-and-white version for comparison purposes.)]

Last week I was reading through some issues of Railroad Model Craftsman from the '70s. In the February '77 issue I came across a photo by Bob Hayden that included the ELM-like photographer figure I chanced upon in his and Dave Frary's Elk River Line article in the May '70 issue of RMC. I figured I'd try and contact Mr. Hayden and see if he could shed some light on whether the figure was influenced in any way by E. L. Moore, or maybe was simply a commercial item, or maybe something else.

I contacted Mr. Hayden via his online bookstore, and he graciously answered my question. Below is a slightly edited version of his reply,

I do remember that the figure was based on the one in E.L. Moore’s photos. I think it started with a Revell figure, one of the few to-scale figures that we had back in the days before Preiser, Merten, and the others. Wire tripod legs, a little block of wood to hold them together, and a bit of cloth or tissue for the cover. Probably took more time to paint than to make. There may have been a tiny reflective jewel on the front to suggest a lens.

Mr. Frary provided confirmation, and kindly provided a colour photo, a black-and-white converted snippet of which I've included in the introductory photo to this post. He also mentioned that he too had built a photographer, but based on a Campbell figure.

A small mystery solved and another addition to the E. L. Moore story.