Putting Fire in the Wire

I’ve been pretty busy lately with our spring farm work so the layout has been kind of put on the back burner.  However, I have been sneaking in some small projects here and there.  I plan on having a substation and associated power lines on the layout.  With that said I needed to build some engineered steel power poles that feed the substation.  These style of poles are becoming more and more common across Montana.  I used the Walthers High Voltage Transmission Towers kit to model my two poles.

This pole will be the main feeder into the substation.  The short stacks on the left will carry one HV phase down to feed the substation.  The longer insulators on the right will carry a second HV phase, bypassing the substation, and feeding a rural transmission line.  I painted the main pole with rustoleum red primer.  The insulators are painted with Testors aluminum.

This is the second pole.  The long insulators will carry the second HV phase which bypassed the substation.  That line will then turn 90 degrees and pull straight from the insulators that are coming straight towards the camera.  The short crossarms halfway up the pole will carry a stepped down three phase distribution line coming out of the substation.