What I was wondering about was if it is possible to construct a raised track system above the town of a finished layout.
Not a monorail system but another full and independant set of tracks to ride above my existing town in HO?
I can already foresee some bad things happening in a derailment situation so I’d have to make the raised tracks with some sort of guard railing to prevent a derailed locomotive from crashing down into my structures.
Come too think of it, if I had too do a monorail as an option I’d consider this is well.
Does anyone know if this has been done or if there are any pics out there of such a layout?
I’ve seen a few layouts that have partial tracks over a section of a city but not over the entire layout.
I always have these bright ideas and then when I throw them out here I’ve been blessed with replies of the hows and why nots of my ideas and this has saved me much trouble in the past.
Any input will be highly appreciated as always.
Thanks in advance for not turning me into the guys with the white coats!!!, Jess Red Horse.
Elevated systems exist in New York, Chicago, and other cities, but these are over strictly urban areas. Over less populated areas, tracks could be on a raised berm, but that would eliminate some of your scenery that’s in place now. The other drawback to an elevated system would be the cost, either kit or scratch built. We had a thread about elevated trackage running recently, but the wonderful new forum won’t let me look it up!! Mr Beasley has a LOWERED track, a subway, but that would be a real pain to install under an existing layout. You do pose an interesting problem - trying to get us to think again?!![:D]
New York City has raised tracks along 10th Avenue in Manhattan. This was the former NYC line that served industries along lower Manhattan, especially the meat companies… My father delivered meat for one when we were growing up. There are other industries that were served as well.
You would need to build the raised track just like the ones that the subways used with the beams on the edge of the sidewalks and the tracks running above the street. It would be a lot of work to add it to a finished area, but it can be done.
Jess, such a concept is rather impractical and has few prototypical counterparts outside major cities. For the most part, elevated trackwork, in the sense and degree that you are talking about, is generally something seen on tinplate/toy train layouts. Actual elevated tracks, are most often located in urban areas, as has already been pointed out and typically has a complex support system of girders and pillars. These would look highly out of place in any rural or semi-rural scene. Stick with modeling on the “ground.”
At first I was wondering if you were talking about a raised loop of track way above your layout, like you find in Hobby Shops (e.g. Willis Hobbies’s loop of track suspended from the ceiling, or even Trainland with a small loop of elevated track raised over an unrelated layout), just for display purposes.
Remember railroads hate unnecessary cost, and building and sustaining a maintenance intensive elevated line when you can just run on the ground (as opposed to running a line through congested industrial districts or through mountainous/irregular terrain/floodplains etc.) would be simply laughed at in the company boardroom.
Although…how about this, since you’re freelancing and have some funky stuff on your layout…A-Train was a Japanese video game from the early 1990s - among the activities would be the building and arrival of the Bullet train into your region, totally elevated and more or less separate from your (on land) rail system - except for a station in the middle of your region’s city. Maybe you could pull something off like that, an around the wall track for high-speed passenger service, which then enters and crosses your layout with a station. If nothing else, it would look cool, you could run passenger trains at a good clip, and the wall shelf track would need minimally scenicking (well, you could go crazy and add superelevation, catenary, signalling, whatever).
If your town is located in a valley, it would be entirely possible for a ridge-running railroad to build right over it in the process of crossing the river - on anything from a series of deck girders to a classic ‘Roman aqueduct.’ CNJ’s neck of the world has lots of examples in rural or semi-rural landscape - including one that had a close encounter with a tornado a couple of years ago.
Incidentally, the usual Northeasternese term for such a structure is, “Viaduct.” Modifiers include Starucca, Tunkhannock and Kinzua (the latter being the tornado victim.)
I was thinking of soing something similar to this on my layout. I model HO and N scale, and resently I added siddings to my HO layout so now I don’t have room for N scale on “ground level” so I was thinking of getting some WS 4" risers and putting the n scale up above the HO.
Have you thought about monorail? There are several prototypes of these, including one in Morgantown, WV that connects two campuses of the university there. just a thought.
At first I thought of the elevated trains I remember from New York, now mostly torn down, and the Chicago system which still has a lot of them. Boston, too, has some elevated sections. But right where I grew up on Long Island, the LIRR runs the kind of operation that Lou mentioned earlier. The tracks are elevated, but not on a metal girder structure. Instead, they are on a raised berm, sort of like roadbed carried to an extreme. This is done to get the trains up above grade and not have to deal with the many highway and local roads that cross the line. Instead, the rails cross each road with a short bridge, so what would be quite a safety problem is avoided entirely.
I would hasten to point out that a viaduct simply carrying a RR across a valley and one running continuously all the way around a layout without terminating at a raised piece of terrain, are two really quite different situations. The latter is almost nonexistant in real life, save for in an urban setting. Since on a small layout the entire elevated run of trackage is visible in a single glance, a totally elevated line in a rural area would make little sense visually.
The only way to make this situation believable is to have the layout divided up with a backdrop(s) into individual scenes, such that the elevated section is modeled running from promontories at the extreme edges of each scene.
Excellent idea, CNJ. However, it depends entirely on whether Jesse is concerned about “believability” or not. If that isn’t his main thrust or focus in modeling, then it doesn’t really matter. I think Jesse’s question is whether it’s possible. The answer: Yes.
Jesse, CNJ’s comment raises a good question. How concerned are you about the elevated track being “believable” with the rest of your layout scheme? Please keep in mind that your answer is contingent upon whether the guys in the white lab coats are asked to enter the room or not. [swg]
What reminds me of what you are talking about is Aurora, IL. When you are at the Metra Station, you have the Metra Tracks in front of you, and the BNSF freight tracks (possibly also used for passenger) are elevated above those tracks.
Also, towns along the Soo Line like Waupaca and Amherst have elevated tracks, and they have what you could call “frontage tracks” that come down, and are used to service the local industries in the town.