Very nice work on the poles. The green doesn't look quite right to my eyes either but it's not terrible.
I looked online to find pictures and the color looks gray or tan. I've seen green but didn't find it in pictures. I think I remember darker green but couldn't find it in pictures and my memory may be wrong. These two pictures are typical of what I found online.
https://glassian.org/Gallery/threaded_group.jpg Search images 'glass insulators'. You name the color...they are all there. IMHO...the light green would show up better with the dark cross arms...
I remember as a kid, going with my grandfather and my brother to a creek near a highway that was said to have been where a bunch of glass insulators had been dumped. My brother did the wading and hunting (with tennis shoes on!) IIRC, the insulators were all either green or clear(ish) glass. This was in the late 1960's or early 70's. I think the porcelain insulators came along later. Maybe they were cheaper to make, and/or more durable.
Note the "green" ones we found were about the color of glass Coca-Cola bottles (fairly light green) if it matters. My grandfather said they were from railroad signal poles, but we did not appear to be near a railroad (though one could have been a hundred feet away through the woods in summer, and would not have known unless a train passed.)
Not too long ago I was in western central Utah headed south to Delta where a lot of that road was alongside the UP track. The short poles and glass insulators still in use. I wish I had taken pics especially since it's been decades since I've seen that. Mostly clear, green then blue is what I saw.
I stopped back at Hobby Lobby and picked up a less green, slightly lighter blue paint. This one is "metallic", so maybe it will look more "glassy". Should look closer to those insulators groups on the very left. We'll see! The "clear" (white) insulators are also painted in a metallic light silver, to give the illusion of a clear glass insulator on a black resin print.
I should head back out there to grab some pics before it's too late. Loved seeing those out on the way to CA as a kid... reminded me of Christmas as dawn broke.
Thanks!! It's fiddly work, equally on-par with that of decaling those tiny signs. It's so easy to slop paint beyond the tiny insulators and onto the arm. Then you need more touchup paint. I bought a SUPER tiny 20/0 spotter paint brush at an art store just for that. It works. Magnification required! *at least for me*
Installed poles on the spring side of the layout. Looking down from over T19: Gross Dam Rd crossing at Crescent.: Looking down from T18: West Crescent looking at T19:
Unless you have a well-trained spider or silkworm, I'd skip the lines. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes it's friggin' awesome!
Thank you everyone! I'm going to skip the lines. I'll let the eye imagine they are there, rather than train a spider to place them for me. I'd go bug-eyed trying to lay 10 wires on each pole... For the wires to be scale, they'd be nearly invisible. I did some searching my library and Flickr gallery of others' winter photos in Rio Grande country to figure out if the snow side poles would accumulate snow. Mixed results. Some images of heavy show showed no accumulation on the crossarms despite plenty on the ground and falling. Others may have been taken a few days after a storm, so the snow melted. Still others accumulated snow not only on the crossarms, but the sides of the poles and the wires! Some snow seemed to stick to everything, other snow was less sticky. Since I want to replicate the aftermath of a blizzard, I might snow the top of the crossarms only. With enough snow, the insulators may not have any color showing, so it doesn't make sense to paint them individually like I did on the spring side. In this Bob Todten image at east Crescent in a snow storm, we see the test of the Seabord System SD50s demonstrating on the D&RGW in March 1984, the one that led to D&RGW buying 17 such units. https://www.flickr.com/photos/130624766@N04/36212129655/ Look at the right side and see the snow accumulating on the pole line, (and everything else). The snow side will need the poles pre-snowed. I don't know if it's worth painstakingly painting each insulator if it'll be covered with snow. I think I might just paint them all brown, the steel braces and bolts silver, and assemble.
Back in the day, I wonder if pole line location was of a concern to rotary snow thrower operators and/or if line placement considered this? Super cool work there @HemiAdda2d ! Fun Fact: Pole lines usually went up and over mountains at tunnel locations so as to keep communications intact if a tunnel were to collapse.
