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Caledonian railway telegraph poles , part 1


Dave John

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Dead easy, several suppliers make plastic ones. Buy some and plant them ?

 

Well, no. These are not any old telegraph poles, these are the telegraph poles of the Caledonian railway. As with so many aspects of pre-grouping different railways did things in a different manner. “Signalling the Caledonian” by Jim Summers has an entire chapter on the subject giving many details and a couple of useful pictures of the L+D under construction so combined with photos from elsewhere I know what I’m trying to build.

 

So, for my location and period big A frame poles where possible, though single poles if space is limited. Alternate long / short crossarms with two insulators. The original shackle type insulators were replaced very early on, so Cordeaux style insulators on J hangers.

 

Stripwood and dowel from Cornwall model boats, insulators from Express models. I had a play about on the bench. Hmm. It didn’t take long to realise that in order to make a consistent set of parts and assemble the posts in an accurate manner the first part of the exercise would be to manufacture a set of jigs.

 

This is what I have come up with. This photo shows the three crossarm jigs, a bit of square brass tube with holes in and a catch as an end stop in two sizes.  Wood in, drill holes, lift catch, slide out.  The lower one has the catch tube in two parts forming a place to bend the J hangers. The one on the left is to hold the crossarm while superglueing the J hangers in.

 

 

515983108_tpolejig1.thumb.JPG.737d0a455ee907f9f9b825f9d9255088.JPG

 

 

 

A photo of an assembly jig laminated up from bits cut on the silhouette.

 

 

381462807_tpolejig2.thumb.JPG.4c5a837de6d7d6d02d669ada4b93066b.JPG

 

That’s the method, should keep me busy for a bit.

Edited by Dave John

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  • RMweb Premium

CRASSOC is fortunate in having members putting in the time and effort to research and publish such things, which help stamp the company's identity on a model.

Edited by Compound2632
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  • RMweb Gold

Some ingenious jigs there. I like this one in particular, I'm going to steal the basic concept of that:

 

Quote

 The one on the left is to hold the crossarm while superglueing the J hangers in.

 

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  • RMweb Gold

Yes, even better. I often find that I need something to hold small bits down for glueing, so the idea of a wire soldered at one end and with a weight at the other seems very useful.

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17 hours ago, Dave John said:

They are all just made up with stuff from the bits box Mikkel. 

It just happens to be a very big bits box.

I think that I must be getting a bit slow, it took me a few minutes to figure out what was what.

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