Modelling telegraph insulators

[South Park]

  The way things worked back in the day will sometimes seem really odd.  But here's my take on it ... The Q wanted to shut down the NG in any way they could, even in tiny increments, it all added up to a final abandonment.  Shut down the tunnel, don't rebuild Trout Creek, and in the case of the telegraph line past Nathrop, they probably gave it away to anyone who would take it over, as long as the new operator provided service to the RR when needed.  Otherwise, they were free to operate it at a profit in any way they saw fit.

  The line over Boreas was said to be taken over by locals after abandonment and photos show it still present long after the rails were pulled.  I don't know the specifics of it or how much of it was kept in service after the C&S abandoned beyond Platte Canyon.

[Jeff Young]

Hi Robert,

While I’m not sure, I get the impression that “railroad was still running” might be somewhat inflated.  “Still providing intermittent service to the Mary Murphy mine” might be more accurate.  (And most of that, interestingly, appears to have been delivery of coal, not shipment of ores.)  

If they weren’t operating the telegraph, for instance, then I doubt they were manning the depots at all.  The required manpower expense along the line was given as one of the big disincentives for re-opening the tunnel.*

Anyone else have anything definitive?

Cheers,
Jeff.

* M.C. Poor and others state that the C&S used a small collapse in the tunnel as a ruse to close it.  I don’t think the historical record backs this up.  At the time, there was no requirement for the railroad to petition for abandonment, and in fact they neither abandoned the line in 1910, nor did they even “close” the tunnel.  They just declined to re-open it because of its cost-structure.

[Jeff Young]

While we're on the Buena Vista / Romley side-track, I dug out a bit more info:

Freight in 1916 was 16,420 tons.  That averages a bit over 50 tons per train.
Passenger numbers were 3711, an average of about 12 per train.

By 1923, these had fallen to 1186 tons of freight (4 tons per train), and 430 passengers (less than 2 per train on average).

[salty4568]

Yes, a cheap alternative for shorter distances was the ground-return phone . . single wire with ground for the second path. Could be rather noisy and weak.

Skip Luke

[Jeff Young]

For my Jefferson telegraph line, I decided to try Rix's clear plastic telegraph arms.  You can (just about) see them on the left of the photo.

Both top and bottom cross arms were shortened, and some of the insulators pruned off the bottom one to match Jefferson's 6-over-3 arrangement.  The wood arm was painted light brown with a top wash of dark brown; the metal brace with dark grey.

The insulators were painted with varying mixes of Tamiya green and blue translucent paints.

The poles are wooden dowels, tapered and notched near the top for the cross arms.  I had little success glueing the arms on with carpenter's glue (Titebond III), and ended up using thick CA with an accelerant.



Cheers,
Jeff.

[Bill Uffelman]

I can hear the singing wires already!

Bill Uffelman

On Tuesday, February 14, 2017 8:58 AM, Jeff Young [via C&Sng Discussion Forum] <[hidden email]> wrote:

For my Jefferson telegraph line, I decided to try Rix's clear plastic telegraph arms.  You can (just about) see them on the left of the photo.

Both top and bottom cross arms were shortened, and some of the insulators pruned off the bottom one to match Jefferson's 6-over-3 arrangement.  The wood arm was painted light brown with a top wash of dark brown; the metal brace with dark grey.

The insulators were painted with varying mixes of Tamiya green and blue translucent paints.

The poles are wooden dowels, tapered and notched near the top for the cross arms.  I had little success glueing the arms on with carpenter's glue (Titebond III), and ended up using thick CA with an accelerant.



Cheers,
Jeff.

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[South Park]

  The look great.  About the only fine tuning I can imagine
would be dialing in the color spectrum of what was typically
used on the South Park line, but you are close as is.  Terrific
detail !

  BTW - the "notches" in the poles for crossarms were known
as "gains".

[deemery]

The Frosted Ultra Detail "flavor" of Shapeways 3D printed material looks a lot like that translucent Rix part*.  So it should be relatively easy to construct and print different pole and insulator patterns.  

dave

* In fact, when I saw the photo, I thought that's what we had here, Shapeways FUD/FXD printed cross arms with printed-on insulators.

[Jeff Young]

Hi Dave,

I do have some 3D printed insulators that eTraxx did, but he said he couldn't get them as small as the Rix ones.  I'm planning on using them for the high tension line that ran up tenmile valley behind Kokomo.

I'll post the results on this thread when I get there.

Cheers,
Jeff

[deemery]

The idea of casting the insulators onto the cross arms as a single part is a good one, I think.  

dave

[South Park]

Just a thought .... single piece casting limits the ability to
easily model the random variations of pole construction.

[Jeff Young]

One of my other hobbies is designing audio electronics, and as part of this I contribute to the open source EDA design tool KiCad.  I recently posted a picture of my Jefferson on the KiCad forum, and got a reply back from someone saying they were an insulator collector and couldn't believe I got the colors right.

I had to confess that I was schooled by another insulator collector.

[Mike Trent]

Very nice, Jeff.

Does anyone offer crossarms like yours in Sn3 and On3? Those are really effective.

Thanks

[Jeff Young]

Rix doesn't do any of the larger scales, which is a bit of a pity as the reason they stopped making the clear arms in HO scale was that it was too hard to get the clear plastic to flow into the moulds uniformly.  A bigger mould might have helped....

[Doug Heitkamp]

Mike,

For On3, San Juan does make clear plastic insulators.

[Mike Trent]

Doug, why, so they do! Thanks much.

Mike