How wide should a backroad HO road be?
Well…that’s similar to asking how tall a tree should be…you may get several different answers as many of us would have a different idea of what a backroad is. An inch and a quarter gives you 9 feet in HO.
The backroads where I grew up…some were wide enough for two tractors to pass and some were barely wide enough for our school bus.
But for a single lane backroad, an old dirt road, I would think 8 - 10 feet would be about right. A Trident Ford crewcab pick-up is about 7 feet wide.
A modern commercial truck body, including those used on farm trucks, can be eight feet, six inches wide. So nine feet wide is a good minimum. Even older trucks were usually about eight feet wide.
wow that seems really skinny, thats only about the width of a piece of HO track… that doesn’t seem right
I mean, and inch and a quater
Raptor55
If it’s a real backroad it may only be 7’ wide and anything bigger than a pickup will have to push through between the bushes and hope there’s no big branches in there.
Then again… if it’s sandy or muddy it may widen out to 30’ or more where people have diverted round the worst soft bits.
Take your choice! [8D]
Of course these days…
There’s a track just at the back of my house that the Electric Company just “improved” to go in and string new cables from the poles. They used a tractor mounted flail to slash back everything in sight for 10’, then they put a bobcat through cutting everything flat about 9’ wide and spreading the stuff from the sides into the worn rut in the middle. It looks a real mess but is a more-or-less level sand road now. I expect that as soon as we get any heavy rain the sides will drop back in and gulleys will form down the middle.
Muddy tracks often get whatever rubble is available tipped into the worst parts. Sometimes branches are hacked off to put under wheels.
If you have an old concrete panel back road (maybe with both concrete (official) passing places and mud (unnoficial) passing places you might like to go to this thread…
http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/893050/ShowPost.aspx
Just yesterday on concrete parking lots. Concrete roads were laid exactly the same way as parking lots whether it was by hand or by paving machine. They would be to standard widths for the machine in the latter case.
There has been stuff in the past on roads made by spraying tar on dirt. Anyone recall which thread(s)?
I still love the pic of the flat racoon that had been line-painted over [:)]
Again… someone asked about ditches beside country roads… and I went on for ages about that…[:I]
If it’s a private or a very old county road, perhaps seven feet per lane would be okay. This means an old two-lane road will be at least fourteen feet wide, side to side.
Any road maintained by a public authority, even an unimproved one (i.e. gravel) is going to have lanes at least eight feet and preferably nine feet wide because of the requirements of maintenance and fire equipment. Fire trucks, which are exempt from federal width limits, can be well over eight feet wide.
FYI, standard lanes are ten to fourteen feet wide with a recommended width of twelve feet. Ten is really the minimum to allow two-way commercial traffic at moderate speeds. Twelve is the minimum for a highway lane. Residential lanes tend to be about nine feet wide and some streets are three lanes to allow parking. The necessity to share the center lane cuts down on speeding.