I forget if I used my own Evergreen strips (they offer a 24" length so you could do it in one continuous strip) or if I spliced pieces of the Walthers Overhead Crane 933-3102 kit.
https://evergreenscalemodels.com/collections/24-60-cm-white-opaque-polystyrene-dimensional-strips
If you Google walthers overhead crane > images you will get lots of ideas. They even show the 250 ton crane bridge resting on a 50 ton crane rail!
In my observation, the yellow paint is probably era-dependant. In the old factory I worked in, the crane rails that were original to the building were painted the building interior color.
Cranes that were installed later, usually by the crane manufacturer or their contractor, were painted yellow or orange depending on the manufacturer’s prefered color. OSHA, after about 1971, probably had some bearing on the safety aspect of using brighter colors on moving equipment, too.
I painted mine yellow, before installation, just to make them show up and viewers could see that there is a crane in there.
Items lifted, meaning lifting the whole building off the layout or “items” found in the shop?
Often there is a special lifting rig attached to the “block” of the crane. Sometimes the hook is removed and a “spreader bar” is used to lift odd shaped loads or, say, a prime mover/generator assembly to be dropped into a locomotive frame.
There are some tiny neodynium magnets out there, you could use one of them on the block and attach a variety of lifting devices with the magnet and a small steel washer glued (hidden) in the device.
Tichy makes some neat looking rigging equipment that comes (if I recall correctly) with the boom car.
