Project For The New Year

My visit to the Western Railway Museum last October rekindled my interest in trolleys and interurbans. Here's East Bay Street Railways car 352, which I rode on that visit:

Below is a really sad case: the Los Angeles Harbor Department, overflowing with cash, built reproductions of two Pacific Electric 500-class cars, which it ran for about ten years on a stretch of ex SP track in San Pedro. A year or so ago, property developers got the land, and the trolley was discontinued.

Anyhow, when I first set up the city of Zenith on my layout, I originally intended to run trolley track down the middle of the main street. I found some precast street sections that were designed to be set up so you could lay HO track and butt the street surface up against it. Here's how the project originally looked about 1995:

However, after some experiment, I found that the street sections weren't set up for realistic curves at the corners -- HO trolleys and interurbans need somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 inch minimum radius, and this is too much for a normal street corner or intersection. So I wound up filling in the space in the street I'd originally meant for trolley track:

But after coming home from the museum, I began to realize I might not need to take the sharp curve at the corner that I'd originally intended. Instead, I could just barely get the track off the middle of the street and make it curve into private right of way behind some urban buildings. I set up a test with some scrap track:

It helps that the scenery here is a combination of old and dusty and never quite finished. What I will need to do will be to carve out a rebate to insert track in the middle -- I hope this will be a little easier for much of the distance, since I filled the space with Sculptamold 20 years ago, which I'm hoping will be easier to work than plaster.

But at least I can add some trolley operation, however minimal, when I got stumped on this 20 years ago.