Hi,
I’m laying a 7 ft long highway on my 1950s era HO layout located mostly in the rural countryside. The highway is two lane “cement”, and intended to be old and somewhat worn.
My intent is to have a “dashed” yellow line for the length of the highway separating the two lanes. My question is, how long should the “dashes” be, and how far apart, and how wide?
Picked up a yellow Sharpie paint pen yesterday, and that should work pretty well to stripe it…
Thanks!
Mobilman44
I don’t remember ever seeing dashed yellow concrete highway lines on country two lane roadways. White dashed lines and solid yellow in Your lane for no passing zones. That is in Illinois in the 40’/50’s era! Some black-top roads in the country, secondary roads, had no lines at all and no shoulder.
Take Care! [:D]
Frank
You need to check on what colors were used in the area you model. I lived in Pennsylvania in the 50s and the center lines, when there was any, were white.
Yellow lines mean that traffic on the other side of the line is opposite direction. Yellow should always be to your left. If you have yellow lines to your right you are someplace you shouldn’t be.
Here in rural Pa, our ‘country roads’ are blacktop with no lines. Some do have double yellow lines down the middle. I would presume that the line style has not changed in 75-80 years. There is even a sizable population that still uses horse and buggys here.
This has been discussed before, a search might find some other threads, but as a 50’s modeler, I have researched this.
In the 50’s there were less uniform standards for this, and most roadway centerlines were white, not yellow, in that time period. It varied from State to State.
Here in Maryland, even when I was a child in th 60’s, most all highway lines were white.
Sheldon
Yes, the various US states had their own rules. Other countries may have been as diverse back then, or they may have been uniform. You will need to local research.
I spent the 50’s in three different countries, ending the decade in the US, California to be specific. I don’t remember the Golden State as having any yellow lines, only white, but maybe I am just misremembering.
I do remember the frequent highway signs exhorting us to Keep California Green and Golden, to which we jokingly added Bring Money and Blondes.
CG
The US Congress passes the Highway Safety Act in 1966 which specified, among other things, what colors the lines should be and that there needed to be edge lines. Prior to that enactment each state had its own standards as to color and when lines were needed.
One thing that I was glad to see eliminated by the act was New Jersey’s use of the center lane of a three lane road as a passing lane for both directions. I suppose the theory was that in the morning everyone was going one direction (to work?) and the afternoon they were going the other (home?). In fact that was far from true.
Late 40’s early 50’s in VT it was one white line in the center, no side lines. If it were safe to pass in both directions it was dashes, otherwise solid. Almost seems to me that in some places went to a single yellow line and if it was safe to pass it was white dashs. Some time along they went to three lines solid on both sides, dashes in the middle. If it were safe to pass going in your direction the solid line was left off, think that started out as all white. Was traveling through several states in those years so not sure if it was state specific or not.
Also, there were some yellow stop signs in the early 50’s. The Walthers catalog used to give you the date they had to be red. The one in the small town I lived in also said “thru way” on it, meaning a full stop, if it just said STOP, I gather it was more like a yield sign. (Not a lot of traffic in them ther’ hills.)
Good luck,
Richard
Here’s a reference source we use:
https://ceprofs.civil.tamu.edu/ghawkins/MUTCD-History.htm
It gives lots of information about highway markings in different eras.
Eric
Traffic signage, road markings, and the like are governed by the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or MUTCD. There have been changes to these regulations over the years, and making sure the markings and signs you use on your roads are appropriate for your modeled era is important for historical accuracy. There’s a site I use that archives a number of editions of the MUTCD from years past. https://ceprofs.civil.tamu.edu/ghawkins/mutcd-history.htm Scroll down to the end and select a link from the “Links to Previous Editions of the MUTCD” to read the one appropriate for your era.
I don’t know for Texas in the 50,s but in Québec yellow color was inexistant on roads then. As for dimensions, I measured some dashed lines not to long ago. The lines are 8" wide, 10 ’ long and 19’ apart.
And I thought this was an easy question…
I could be wrong, but to the best of my memory, two lane highways in Illinois in the late 50s would have the lanes separated by a yellow line. If there was a no passing zone, the line was solid. If passing was ok, the line was dashed.
I can’t swear that this was the case, but until I read all these posts, I assumed it was. Yikes!
This is from an old MUTCD manual (1970)
On rural highways, broken lines should consist of 3 m (10 ft) line segments and 9 m
(30 ft) gaps, or similar dimensions in a similar ratio of line segments to gaps as
appropriate for traffic speeds and need for delineation.
Option:
A dotted line may consist of 0.6 m (2 ft) line segments, and 1.2 m (4 ft) or longer gaps, with a maximum segment-to-gap ratio of 1-to-3.
Mel
Modeling the early to mid 1950s SP in HO scale since 1951
My Model Railroad
http://melvineperry.blogspot.com/
Bakersfield, California
I remember rural two-lane roads in the 50s in the upper midwest having dashed white lines with sold yellow lines indicating no passing zones. Could have been different elsewhere in the country.
I traveled all over the country in the 50’s and don’t remember a single yellow line, only white and rural roads did not have a centerline at all. Even been on gravel roads with soft shoulder, hit it at speed and you could be done for, my parents did that twice and flipped both times.
Agreed, even in the 60’s I remember mostly all white here in the Mid Atlantic.
Shoulders? What are shoulders? Around here we still have lots of rural roads with 10’ lanes and no shoulders.
Here in our little “village”, the two lane state highway in front of our house has curbs but is only about 26’ wide from curb to curb…
Sheldon
Here’s a “side” issue (pun intended):
Around 1962, my family and I traveled from Ohio into the mountains of West Virginia, and I remember noticing that West Virginia marked the outside edge with a white line. We had never seen this in Ohio, and were grateful for it on those curvy mountain roads, especially after dark. I have no idea when this practice started in West Virginia, but it sure wasn’t the norm in Ohio in 1962.
Tom
Those white edge of pavement markings came in very handy on foggy Appalachian nights. Many years ago I lived in North Carolina and traveled between Greensboro and Toledo, Ohio on a regular basis. I recall one night when the fog was so thick coming down from Galax, Virginia on US 52 that my wife guided me by opening her passenger side door and telling me left/right by looking at the edge marking. I couldn’t see a thing from the drivers side. Needless to say, we did that at a crawl and I thought we’d never get down to Mt. Airy, North Carolina.
As a further aside, those same foggy nights resulted in the joke that Piedmont Airlines had more buses than airplanes. When trying to fly into Roanoke or Charleston you were likely to get diverted and bused in.
Ray
I took it upon myself to contact IDOT (Illinois Department of Transportation) on mobilman44’s behalf to inquire about lane markings in the 1950s. Steven was dead on with the link that he provided. I received a detailed response from an engineer at IDOT that included that link, and I forwarded that response to the OP.
In part, the engineer provided the following commentary:
Centerline markings were placed on all hard-surfaced roads with sufficient width. A single solid line at a 5 inch width was used for 2-lane highways. Typically, black was used on concrete and white was used on brick or asphalt, but black would have been used if the surface was faded to a whiter color to provide contrast. If the pavement width accommodated 4 or more lanes, then double solid yellow lines were used in the middle of the pavement. These lines were also 5 inches in width and were 5 inches apart. Lane lines were also used for these multilane highways and matched what was used for 2-lane highways.