Hi,
Curious to know how folks handle doing a road crossing on a curved piece of track. I am building a road and I am using wooden crossings for the straight pieces, but I am not sure about the bends. I can make the road through the other straight pieces but that would limit the size of the buildings that I could use near them. That is why I thought about a winding road going through two bends. I am using Woodland’s Smooth it, which works great by the way.
Thanks,
Kevin
I don’t use a pre-fab road crossing product. I cut strip wood to length and glue it between the rails, and plaster or AMI instant roadbed for the portions of the crossing outside the rails. I stain the wood between the rails, and paint the approaching roadway to represent asphalt, concrete, or dirt/gravel road because I’m modeling semi-rural areas in the 1940s.
Do it just like the prototype did…board by board, cut to fit.
These happen to be straight, but the same technique will work. In the first picture, the white shapes are pieces of styrene sheet. They go up to the outside edge of the ties. Between the rails is a piece of styrene about a half-inch wide, with clearance for wheels on either side. I put those strips in after I took the picture, so they’re not shown. (Sorry, it’s really a picture of the bridge, but the grade crossings are in the background.)
Next, I covered the styrene outside the tracks with Durham’s Water Putty. This makes a nice uneven surface which looks like a slightly lumpy road. I painted the styrene strips between the rails with straight gray acrylic, the cheap stuff from a craft shop or Wal-Mart. After the putty hardened, I painted that with a couple of washes from the same gray acrylic.
Most grade crossings I have seen in the “olden days” were planked. They looked much like cross ties stretched between the rails. For a curve , cut shorter planks to allow them to be be laid in a curved pattern. Sometimes there were planks against the outer edges and the dirt or asphalt laid up to them.
Some crossings had a guard rail to provide room for the wheel flanges and were paved between the guard rails instead of using planks, much like trolley tracks in the middle of a road. If you have asphalt roads, that would be the way to go.
This may sound exceedingly simple, but in many prototypes I’ve seen, they literally just pave the center of the tracks, with just enough room for the rails and wheels. I actually had this same problem on my first railroad, and I just used the stuff from the Woodland Scenics roadbuilding kit and put it between the rails, then used a hobby knife to carve out the tracks once it started setting up. Now you have to be absolutely sure you do this correctly so as not to interfere with your trains’ wheels, but I think it worked just fine with just a little care. And it saved alot of time and follows prototype, especially since I was modeliong a rural midwestern town where they wouldn’t have fancy grade crossings. Good luck!
Hi,
Thank you all for the great advice.
Kevin