How many fellow modelers are installing point rodding? Not necessarily actual working rodding, but dummy rods and pipes for aesthetic purposes? I don’t see as many occurrences of it in U.S. layouts as I do British layouts.
I was kicking around the idea of adding some, as I am close to the ballasting stage and was wondering what the consensus was.
I bought some Peco rodding kits, but have done nothing with them at this point… Jim
Point rodding disappeared when Centralized Traffic Control was installed on U.S. railroads and switch towers were eliminated.
I have several videos downloaded from You-Tube about British railways, and it seems that modern control systems have eliminated switch towers and point rodding there, too, except on some of the tourist lines.
In the early years of the last century, many electrically operated interlocking plants were put into operation, so manually operated plants weren’t the only option in the 1900’s. Bill Darnaby had an article on building a manual interlocking tower with nonoperating rodding in M.R. I think it was in the mid 1990’s. He had some very good ideas for representing the rodding.
Tom
Ask BN in the 70’s about the manual interlocking plants still in operation. Division St in St Paul was a huge plant(over 40 levers). What finally took it out was a Milwaukee ‘Skally’ train that derailed on the plant - Not enough spare parts could be found to rebuild it. By 1977, it was all CTC. Most of the plants in the Upper Midwest were converted in the 70’s. Mills Tower(IC/RI) in Iowa may have been the last one in this region.
The manual ‘pipes’ many times were replaced with electric or air operated switch motors - The actual interlocking bed in the tower was still intact, it just operated electrical switches to the motors.
Peco makes non-operating mechanical interlocking pipe kits in plastic. SS89 is the basic kit, and SS90 is the extension kit. They appear to be ‘square’ rather than round ‘pipe’ like in most US installations, but should still look good. They include about 3’ of ‘pipe’, rollers and various fittings. The SS90 extension kit includes another 3’ of pipe/rollers.
Jim