I am finaly getting to putting in the telephone/power poles. Two questions:
How are the poles oriented when the wires have to turn a sharp corner. I have Atlas poles with a central pole and 3 crossarms. I assume the pole will have to be braced but is there a prototype problem with the wires gettin too close together if I just turn the corner? What the wires do is come down the tracks, turn to cross the tracks and then back up the other side.
Some of the poles have an aditional arm sticking out one side with a single large insulater. What was this used for?
There’s a very good article on line poles in last year’s MR issue of How To Build a Realistic Railroad that discusses these sorts of issues. FWIW, the Rix telephone poles are quite nice and you can add up to five (5) cross braces on each pole.
Art, are you using the poles to represent railroad communications? Most poles cross over the rails at an angle, so there isn’t a chance of them touching. Most poles run about 12 to 15 feet abve ground, then go up to 20 or more to crossrails. Figure most poles at about 80 feet apart, then the ones crossing over are about thirty to forty feet, that gives you an angle with no touching. I hope this helps. Mike
Here at the phone company when we had that situation, the corner pole would have two sets of crossarms. One facing each direction. The normal wires would come onto one set of crossarms and then have blouse wires (wires not under stress) to the crossarm(s) facing the other direction. This prevents the stress in one direction from pulling the wires taught across those going in the other.
The pole would have two supporting guy-wires, one for each direction. And I say “two” loosely, as many poles require more that one guy-wire to support it. So my “two” would be for the two directions of the guy-wires not the number in a set.
I don’t know if this holds true for power or telegraph lines.
I’d suggest following the overhead lines around your area to see how they’re built. There aren’t that many different ways to build an overhead powerline around the country.
When turning a corner, the line is either dead-ended each direction, which is often seen with two different sets of crossarms, or is built with a running angle where the conductors are stacked vertically and the insulators hang off one side of the pole. If the running angle is slight, sometimes they’ll do it on a crossarm where they’ll use similar, but slightly different insulators to take the horizontal strain on the angle.
[:)] Hey Art Little off the subject of poles. I found this site after going to the Augusta Maine Train show. This gentleman was there representing his company called Scale University he does laser cut buildings of very good quality. He also had detail items that made me think of your western scenes. Here is his website