I’m working on a downtown scene for our club layout and would like to have a street car line included in the scene. It has been suggested that I use a silver tape to represent the rails of the street car line; this seems quite lame. I would like to have actual rails imbedded in the street pavement (will be made of styrene). I seem to have seen a system for accomplishing this and to make the street car line operational as well. Does anyone have suggestions?
There was just a series of posts on this recently. http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/p/212574/2330995.aspx#2330995. It was for an N-scale layout but the ideas would apply to HO or other scales.
Joe
The Proto87 “Electric Avenue” products will give you realistic “girder rail” and they also provide several different forms of pavement, cobblestones and bricks which match up with the rails.
http://www.proto87.com/easy-street--track-system.html
I’ve installed a few feet of this myself. There’s some learning curve to get it right, but it does look very nice. Getting track that works reliably has proven difficult, but I think it needs more work. I’ve even considered ripping it up and trying again.
Not, perhaps, what you are looking for but in older cities such as Milwaukee it took a long time for all the streetcar tracks to be paved over or removed (indeed from time to time they unearth more streetcar trackage during sewerline projects). In many cases what they did do was fill up the flangeways. That would be an interesting way to convey that a given part of the layout is urban, “of a certain age,” and not a high priority for repaving – exactly the characteristics of your average warehouse or industrial district, many of which are or were also rail served.
You could mimic that look of embedded street car trackage with Plastruct structural shapes since all that shows is the top of the rail.
Perhaps that “silvery tape” idea was also trying to capture that look. But old rails are not silver. You could try to capture the look of a streetcar line where – darn it - you just missed seeing a streetcar: trackage and overlead wire but no actual street cars. Rather like that fellow whose O scale layout has appeared who models a switching district with a nearby heavy electric mainline railroad running through, with over head catenary that uses rail ripped from N guage flex track. But no electric locomotives or trains! His story, or conceit if you will, is that you just missed seeing the mainline train.
Dave Nelson
Dave does have a good idea about doing the rails or track as abandon. But one point that I have to disagree on is that the old rails were silver. The rust that would be on the top of unused street tracks were worn off by vehicle traffic. This would be the case as long as the track or rails were in the streets.
You might investigate ORR rail. In use among traction modelers. It gives a reasonable approximation of in street rail with the flangeway. Mine was easy to install and runs well. Doesn’t look as good as the Proto 87 product but the P87 wasn’t available when I put in my rail.
Guy