Bob Davis’s Warwick Water Tower inspired me to want to add a water tower to my layout. The question is: What kind of water towers? So I started looking into it. I don’t include below narrow gauge water towers, wooden towers, or basically utilitarian-looking water towers. That leaves, near as I can tell, the following categories:
Novelty advertising towers:
Towers painted in some artist or unusual way:
Space-age-looking towers:
And finally, towers that look like brick-like structures, often rather “castle” looking, mostly European although there are some in the United States like the Chicago water tower, for instance:
However, the one I have tentatively chosen is in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s more utilitarian but its visually complicated and has a lot of interesting features and layers, including the interesting lighting rod assembly. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I’m up to this because I haven’t worked in styrene or metal, and certainly have never done any soldering like Bob did. Ain’t gonna happen. So I’ll have to get ingenious. Also, the project may be doomed from the start if I can’t come up with a believable height for the structure. I don’t want it to dwarf everything else on the layout, but it has to give the appearance of great height at the same time. And the tank on the top has to be big enough to plausibly hold enough water to make all that construction seem like it’s worth it. I don’t know.
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