Overhead wires for Hot Springs Jct.

One of the things I've been working on for the past several days was to get all of the poles installed that would simulate overhead electric wires.  In theory, my free lanced Hot Springs Junction module could be one of those places in Japan that uses Diesel rail cars as those are more common in the more remote mountainous areas.  But the trains that will be run on the mountain division and AsiaNrail lines will include electrics so I wanted to include the wire structures.  Kato, Tomix, and TomyTec all offer versions of this type of model in N scale.

For most of the line I used TomyTec kit No. 020 shown here.  I picked this up on one of my trips to Japan and it looks like I paid 690 yen for each set of 3 double track structures.

I needed single track structures so I cut out the middle section to get two structures from each as shown in this photo.

After removing the model from the spue and cutting out the middle section, I touched up the paint.  The brown of the pole was close to Floquil rail brown and the green of the cross arm was close to an old bottle of Polly Scale paint I had around.

To mount these type of poles I drilled out the inside of a 1/8 inch styrene tube to give the pole a snug fit.  Then drilled a hole in the scenery and glued the tube into the hole.  The tube was then painted a concrete color.

This is a very similar method I used on the Musashi-Koyama modules and that has worked out well.

As with any other track side details it is important to maintain the proper clearances from the tracks, particularly on the inside of a curve.

It's also not that hard to scratch build overhead wire structures for those places where needed.  Here is one of 4 identical ones I made to use between the platforms at the station.

The pole was painted a gray color with the colors of the cross arm, braces, and insulators being a close match to the TomyTec pole structures.

Here is one of the four installed at the station.  For these I drilled a smaller hole and glued the exposed wire on the bottom of the pole without using the plastic tube sleeve the way I did on the TomyTec poles.

Here is the over all view of the station area with all of the poles installed.  I used 13 of the single track poles plus the 4 scratch built double track poles.

Eventually I would also like to have overhead wire structures on the Ntrak lines as well.  The 3 track type of the style from Tomix that I used on the Musashi-Koyama modules line up just right with the Ntrak track spacing as shown here.