Elec. service - forgotten detail?

Folks:

Right now my model railroad is the Packed-away Pacific, and I've been doing lots of electrical work on the house, which led me to wonder something: how many of us have modeled the hardware of the power company? You see lots of power poles, but very seldom the web of service drops that connects them to houses. How many of us have 3-phase transformers on poles near smaller industries? I seem to recall E. L. Moore building some of these in old articles. How about meter boxes? These are quite prominent, especially once you get into multi-unit apartment buildings and so forth, and they even show up with underground service.

This is just idle curiosity on my part. I for one have never installed such details, but I think next time I am going to, just to see if it's the missing detail that would make my city look complete.

Cordially yours: Gerard P.

Reply to
pawlowsk002
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In Japan, most electric supply in cities is by overhead wiring, and small trannys on street poles are a big feature of the streetscape. These items are available in N scale from Kato, GreenMax and the like. But what about the associated tangle of wires, who's going to model that? Regards, Bill.

Reply to
William Pearce

I raised a question in regards to this on another forum - how to model 'weatherheads', which is the curved section of half-pipe which directs the incoming service feed from the power pole line down into the conduit on the building side which leads to the meter (this is the most common commerical/industrial set-up I see on Long Island). Some answers that came up were using brass tubing curved, slicing the bottom part of the curved tube off length-wise; bending a small strip (in 3 dimensions) to achieve this affect; or just using a curved tube, forget the slicing. The remaining parts of the most common above ground feed systems are fairly simple - the meter itself is a thick section of styrene, covered with a thinner piece, and with a hole drill roughly in the center of the face and a short, thick section of clear styrene inserted. Add to this a scale 4" or so length of rod from the top of the meter to the weatherhead (to really detail, add very 2-3 thin slices of bare-metal foil horizontally along this rod to resprent the wall anchors), and a thinner, shorter length of rod from the meter into the wall (really, it should go into a thick, narrow section of square styrene block, which would have it's corner's rounded off - this then represents the conduit box service entrance through the wall). Paint the entire unit some shade of white, grey, or alumimun (or combination thereoff) - except for the transparent rod representing the actual meter, of course. This almost takes less time to actually do than describe. In the past I have also seen these exact pieces available as scale detail parts - not sure if they are still offered, but I guess so...

Reply to
Sir Ray

'weatherheads'< These are available as cast parts along with outside boxes, etc. I just can't remember where, but I have a bunch in my parts boxes. May have been Alexander who is now owned by someone else but would assume the parts are still available. HO scale.

Reply to
Jon Miller

snipped-for-privacy@gannon.edu skriver:

In Denmark - where I live - allmost all electrical cables is put into the ground. In "the old days" (my house is from 1923) they started with connections to the houses at seperate wires from the mast by the road to a wall on the house. On the wall there were isolators and cable going into the house. Meters and so on was inside. Today the electrical companies require that the meters can be read from outside, but it is allways hidden behind a cover and biuld into the wall.

The "old fashioned way" is often made in model too, but requires a lot of work.

Klaus

Reply to
Klaus D. Mikkelsen

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