I plan to not include a water tower in my engine service facility. I need a coal tower, an oil column, and a water column. That takes care of all the fuel and water for my locomotives. There will also be a sand house and an ash pit.
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How far away would the tanks for oil and water be placed? My backdrop will be about 75 scale feet from the columns, that does not sound too far to me. Could I just paint the tanks on the backdrop, or would that be too great a distance?
Thank you.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
I don't think seventy-five feet is too far of a stretch. Keep in mind that there were hundreds of water tank/standpipe installations so there were bound to be variables.
http://historicpittsburgh.org/islandora/object/pitt%3A8223.126.RR/viewer
Depending on the actual source of water, the RR certainly didn't want to pay for municipal water if they didn't have to, so there may have been a consideration for placing the tanks closer to the well, lake, river or stream as the case may be.
You might want a pump house and chemical treatment building as well, if you can fit them.
Here's a view that shows two tanks, far left, and two stand-pipes, the closer one certainly being more than seventy-five feet from the tank.
SeeYou190Could I just paint the tanks on the backdrop, or would that be too great a distance?
Why not get a Walthers or Tichy water tank and build two halves and stick them in the backdrop as a 3-D structure?
https://www.walthers.com/steel-water-tank-kit-3-1-4-x-3-x-7-quot-11-3-x-7-5-x-17-5-cm
Regards, Ed
In the mountains, you don't necessarly need a water tank. Given the right source in terms of pressure and flow, the water supply can be sufficient to serve a column. The vertical fall was usually sufficient for pressure, the real issue would be volume for something like a column.
Such sources can be low maintenance. At Woodstock, Colorado on the west side of Alpine Tunnel on the DSP&P and the site of a famous deadly avalanche, the water still runs. The old ROW is the road and there you can find the foundation of the water tank (in this case). There, a about 4" pipe still flows freely with water well over a century after it was built and long after the tank went out of use.
Silverton, Colorado is one place where you won't find a water tank. Yet there were lots of trains needing water (back in the day, the Rio Grande plus the 3 shortlines that ran north from it.) There's been speculation about how water was brought in, although many say that locos simply stopped at the last tank on the way into town.
On my layout, I figured I'd just put in a water column near the station, fed from ...somewhere. I've also done this at several other points as part of a "modernization" program designed to lower costs otherwise spent on tank maintenance. Such a free flowing source sometimes also has the advanatage of not requiring heat to keep it from freezing, like tanks often will. Works for me.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Kevin, I agree with Ed, go 3D when possible, a half a tank doesn't look too awful when space is in short supply.
Regards, Peter
From what I've seen, it wasn't uncommon for a railyard to have one large water tank, with several water columns getting water from it, sometimes spread out over a fairly large area.
Except for some logging or low-budget shortlines, trains generally wouldn't just siphon water directly from a lake or stream. They'd pump the water into a water tank, and most likely treat the water to remove impurities that could cause problems in the steam engines.
My dad said that when he lived in Galesburg IL there were two big lakes in town, both man-made. One was owned by the Burlington Route, the other by the Santa Fe, and each was used for water for steam engines.
In my hometown, we had a large steel water tank (the kind on stilts, like many municipal water systems use) almost right across the street. It was on an elevated right-of-way (grade separation done in the '30s) and supplied standpipes several city blocks away.
While I do use a few wooden water towers on my layout, I also built three of these...
The tanks are heavy cardboard tubes for paper used on some long-extinct office machine. I put a .005" sheet styrene wrapper around them, embossed with rivet detail done with a cheap drawing compass. The base is, I think, made from Walthers styrene brick sheets, with a foundation and top of .060" sheet styrene.
One supplies 3 standpipes about 260' away, a second one serves 2 standpipes, the farthest at about 480', and the third will service three, the farthest almost 700' away. These distances are well within those of my cited prototype.I do agree, though, that if you can squeeze it in, a three-dimensional or even a low-relief version will look better than a photo or painted-on one.
Wayne
Everybody,
Thank you for the replies and the information. I am releived I do not need to have the water tank very close by. That makes the scene a lot easier to fit in to the available space.