Monday, September 16, 2013

Steam engine terminal overhead steam line

I have had several Diamond Scale Construction company steam engine terminal overhead steam line pole kits for a long time and decided to construct them and install them in my small engine facility, which consists of a turntable and three tracks - no roundhouse or engine house. The prototype used these overhead steam lines for engines with their fires out to keep them warm and save time when placing the engines in service.  The kit parts are nicely done and consist of two "poles" per kit.  They are mostly cast white metal parts but no steam line is supplied.  They recommend using #14 insulated electrical wire which is what I used.  The instructions are sketchy but adequate.

Below is a photo of the four posts I constructed before they were painted.


I built the first one using ACC cement which was a pain, so I used small amounts of contact cement as well as ACC on the other three. There were a lot of small pipe fittings that needed to be drilled out to fit on the brass wire pipes - that was ever so much fun.

The steam line (insulated wire) runs from a boiler house in the background across each of the poles with a fitting on the line over each track that has a tee fitting that hold a Z shaped extensible line to connect to each boiler.  Installing those was the biggest pain of all.  Fortunately my layout is only 3 feet deep at that point so the reach to install was only about 2 feet.  I may go back later and add some more details but I have had enough of this for now.



You can see a bit of the turntable on the left.  Above the boiler house is an elevated track.  The small rail car this side of the engine is an old Kemtron railcar with added detail.  While it will run, it has two speeds - really fast and stop, thus it is for scenery only.

I am polishing up my layout for the MER convention next month so will pretty much only be doing scenery during that time.



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