One of the characteristic views from the coach window when travelling on our railways , until the late 1970's was the continual dipping and rising of the telegraph wires. Telegraph, telephone and signalling block instrument communications were all carried alongside the line suspended from the iconic multi-arm telegraph poles. Whilst the poles themselves are often modelled, there being a number of manufacturers of such in the popular scales, creating the actual wires, especially to scale is somewhat more of a challenge. I have seen fine thread and fine wire used by others but these have always proved to be very delicate and easily damaged.

On Fisherton Sarum I have modelled a short stretch of the telegraph poles and wires. I have used suitably painted Ratio telegraph poles, using more greys than browns. The distance between the poles has also been somewhat compressed, although a change in direction of the route has given a reason for the close proximity of a couple of the poles.

For the wires I have used a product called ‘Silk worm – magicians invisible thread’ this is in fact very fine elastic and at the time was available either in clear or black. The clear is exactly what it says on the reel and is pretty much impossible to see so defeated the object for using as telegraph wires somewhat, so I used the black. Even so, using the black, the wires often tend to go unnoticed by many viewers of the layout and also depends on the angle that they are viewing from and the point at which they are trying to focus on.

This an extract of my external blog at www.grahammuz.com

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