Moale, Vintage OO photos

Vintage OO Layout Photos III: Moale Trolleys in Color

In materials received from the OO SIG were a group of photos of the layout of Commander Edward S. Moale, including the four photos featured today. Moale not only had a long military career, he was also trolley enthusiast, and he built up a large collection of American OO scale trolley models and also built layouts to operate them upon.

 

This first photo is an overview of what must be a good chunk of the layout. How many trolleys do you see?

 

The second photo shows another corner of the attic layout room, this area with a farm and a commercial backdrop for a countryside feel. Note that three tracks are visible and the models operate from the overhead wire. The closer car is more what I would think of as a city trolley and the rear cars are interurbans.

 

The third and fourth photos are dated January, 1958 on the mounting. We can see more of the overhead but also note that the closest track has a center third rail (Lionel style) and we can see the roof of a box car in the lower right corner. Oh, and do you see the elephant?

 

The last photo is actually the sharpest but features a British model, obviously converted to run on 19mm gauge track and probably from center third rail. This is another angle on the same scene as in the first photo and we can see that the depot is for the town of Henrietta. About ten trolley models are visible in this photo as well.

I have a few more Moale photos, in black and white, and will return to them at a future date in this series.

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