Given my recent decision to construct a two-rail layout with dummy third rail, this means I'm going to need third rail chairs. Unfortunately, the only such chairs that are commercially available that I know of are the ones from Q car, and these are for the Interborough Rapid Transit or the Independent Subway and Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit lines in New York. Some of the third rail chairs used in Chicago are slightly similar to the IND/BMT chairs, but having seen them in use as part of a display for a pair of "L" cars, they just don't look right.
Chicago was home to two third rail lines: the "L" and the Chicago Aurora and Elgin. I'm going to begin with a set of CA&E chairs, primarily because these were the most readily available.
This style of third rail chair was used throughout most of the CA&E's history.
Back to Google Sketchup! I started by creating a box with the length of the long portion of the base, the width of the wide square portion of the cap, and the height of the flat portion of the cap. I then deleted the sides of the box so that I was left with a basic frame. Doing it this way removes the need to try to line everything up later.
Creating the cap was a pretty straightforward task of drawing a series of squares of the appropriate lengths and pulling the created faces. The hardest part was creating the curved ends for the protruding pieces that hold the rail in place.
The wooden block beneath the cap is, for the most part a straight forward block. About halfway down, the edges are cut off at an angle in a decorative way.
Recreating this in Sketchup has proved problematic and I haven't yet found a solution. Stay tuned!
Looks good! Couple of things, though. Make sure to make the chair fit the size rail you plan on using ... Code 148, 128 ... rather than be exactly scale size. Also, I wouldn't worry too much about the curved relief. In O, its going to be small so any curve will be minimal in the FUD. You could probably get away with even a slanted surface.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads up! In my efforts to get the right measurements, I'd forgotten about the different sizes of rail.
DeleteAs far as the curves go, I realized that it almost certainly wouldn't show up once scaled down to O, but I should at least try to get it correct in this model for two reasons. First, it'll give me a nice project on working in Sketchup with curves it doesn't like, which should come in handy when making more complex shapes like on some of the modern "L" cars. The second reason is that someday I might be able to use full scale 3D models on GreatThirdRail.org so that visitors could then "walk" around an object in all dimensions if they can't visit the real thing. (Not an immediate goal.)