"Change River Levels with a Dam Site" 12/06 MR magazine

Mark Mathu spake thus:

Whoops!

Sounds like a couple million dollars in change orders to me.

Looks like Mark is correct; see Figure 5 on

Still is a beautiful job!

Another Bob

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Maybe it was deliberate. To see how many people would notice.

Bill Bill's Railroad Empire N Scale Model Railroad:

House Scene: Saucer Scene: Page: Railroad Books, Toys, and Trains:

"Bill" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com:

I doubt it. More like failure to notice details. As an electrical engineer I constantly notice that the electrical systems (on those layouts that model electrical systems) are constantly wrong.

Mine are 100% accurate. They're all underground. :-)

-- Cheers

Roger T.

Home of the Great Eastern Railway

Gord:

Or missing altogether, and it does remove some hard-to-define bit of life from a modeled scene. Even an underground system pokes its gray conduit tentacles above ground very frequently.

Even such common details as industrial clutter can be hard to get right. These days we often hear that 'modern industries have no clutter'. This is, of course, not always true, but clutter in any era must be picked with care, except of course for tires and shopping carts, which seem to crop up everywhere.

E.L. Moore had a good eye for detail. For instance, he liked to make up 'fiberboard' trash barrels from paper and spot them around his factories. This is a very common detail which you don't see very often.

What if those of us who had some expertise in one field, such as electricity, were to make up little simple mini-FAQ pages and post them on Usenet? It's hard to plow through a whole manual on, say, substation design, just to get some idea of what a modeled station should look like.

Cordially yours: Gerard P.

snipped-for-privacy@gannon.edu wrote in news:1162217745.250989.295580 @m7g2000cwm.googlegroups.com:

*snip*

Thanks for volunteering.

Puckdropper

In message , snipped-for-privacy@gannon.edu writes

Superb idea. A similar site is already running, here in the UK, put together by one chap, with plenty of assistance offered by fellow members of uk.rec.models.rail

The address is

The site title is Goods & Not So Goods, An overview of railway freight operations for modellers. Try clicking on the link Appendix One - Outside the Fence, which addresses the type of subject under discussion, from both modern and historical perspectives.

A 'sister' site, devoted to details of US railways and lineside industries would be perfect for those of us with an interest in the US, but limited opportunities to visit in person.

I didn't intend to bad-mouth what Bob accomplished with his dam model. In O scale, I bet the overall effect really is impressive.

But I thought I should point it out for anyone who wants to attempt a similar project. The curved gate face with a center of curvature located where the trunnion pins are is the key element of a Tainter gate. It's what makes it relatively easy to open and close, regardless of what the water level is behind the dam.

__________ Mark Mathu The Green Bay Route:

"I started out with nothing and I still have most of it."

Perhaps he was modeling a government pork barrel job? :-)

Maybe all it needs is the addition of a sign

"The Dam Project. Your tax dollars at work."

Mine are 100 % accurate too. They're all missing. :-)

Alan

snippety

One interesting little detail you could add is a tracked vehicle with an extendible long reach crane and bucket on it - there are usually two or three parked in the fenced in yard around the local sub-station a few blocks from my home. They look a lot like the snow-cats that you see in the arctic, but with open hulls and wide track treads for soft ground. While the big electric towers are usually fairly easy to reach from the road that parallels them , they also have stretches miles in length that go across open country, farm fields, heavy woods (with paths cut through but still fairly rough), etc. The treaded vehicles can go almost anywhere without getting stuck.

Ed

I just read Mark's letter to the editor in the current MR mag. Well done!

Peteski

Thanks. I hope it didn't come across as nit-picking. As I wrote in this newsgroup and tried to emphasize in my letter, I didn't intend to bad-mouth what Bob accomplished with his dam model. But the incorrect curvature of the tainter gate stood out to me, and I thought that modelers who may want to follow Bob's lead should be made aware of it.

That was my the first letter I ever wrote to the editor of Model Railroader, or any magazine for that matter.

My last paragraph was edited for brevity (and besides, they had a far better example in the letter previous to mine): "The caption of figure 5 states 'It's unlikely that a railroad bridge would be built so close to a dam, but it's necessary here.' As an example of there being a prototype for everything, I offer Canadian National's ex- GB&W line in Hatfield, Wis. which has a bridge built on the same foundation as the adjacent dam with Tainter gates. A 1911 flood destroyed the original dam and nearby railroad tracks; the owner of the dam had to build the new bridge at the dam site as compensation to the railroad."

The railroad bridge girders block many of the gates on this image of the dam, but the nearest gate is open as evidenced by the steel of the gate and the flow of water below the bridge.

__________ Mark Mathu The Green Bay Route: "I started out with nothing and I still have most of it."

Itdidn't look like nitpicking to me. You were introduced as civil engineer and as sich you would have the knowledge of the tainter gate principles. We all at one time or another likely end up building some model where we aren't experts in that field. And in these cases if we do not have enough research material, we can make mistakes. Seems that's what happened here.

Peteski