A recent calculation by Brenner, McQuarrie, and Olivares on the effect of attractive forces on the orderhyphen;disorder phase transition in a gas of long hard rods is extended to include a more realistic attractive interaction potential. Rather than use the conventional squarehyphen;well potential, we modify the attractive part of the potential such that the attractive interaction energy is proportional to area of overlap of the attractive regions. This is meant to reflect the fact that the more two rods are in register, the stronger is their attraction. The effects of well depth and well width on the thermodynamic parameters characterizing the phase transition are rehyphen;examined. This modified model yields significantly different results than the previous one for several of the transition parameters.
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