most go by how the model acts, and most have a hand pump or provisions for a hand held pump bottle to be used. With the steam blower running, you keep pumping till it starts to squirt water out of the steam blower, that means full boiler. If the model starts to slow down while running, you stop, turn on the blower and start pumping water. Sight glasses, even in G scale are notorious for not being accurate. Unlike the real ones, running low on water isnt an explosion waiting to happen. These are low pressure steam, under 3 bar is typical and the boilers are hugely overbuilt. On an alcohol fired engine, loss of draft commonly results in the fire going out as it needs a draft to keep burning. Once you learn your engine, you know how quickly or not it runs low on water. There is an "Art" to running live steam, its very hands on and not for everybody. But everybody should give it a try at some time in my opinion, either in O gauge or G gauge(I have both)
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