Trolley pole rope loops

There are a lot of little jobs that need to be done on the layout to get it into a state suitable for running and photographing. One of the smallest is to add rope loops to the trolley poles to two members of the PCC fleet.

The Bowser PCCs come with rope loops on their trolley poles, but one of mine had a loop that was either malformed, or broken by my mishandling sometime ago. Either way, the pole needed repair. 

To create a new rope loop I took a strand of wire from a multi-strand picture hanging wire, bent it around a drill bit of suitable diameter, and after a little trimming, superglued it to the damaged trolley pole. The picture on the left shows the new rope loop after a dab of flat black paint. It's a little larger than the original, but it doesn't look too bad.

A similar update was made to the Con-Cor PCC's trolley pole. In this case though the model didn't start out with a rope loop, so this is an addition instead of a repair.

The next step for all the cars will be to add trolley ropes so the poles can properly engage with the overhead wire.