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Truth be told, many projects work out to be quite different than we pictured them when we started.  Not this one - the look in the photos and videos below is exactlywhat I have had in mind for the last six years - a  lonely, isolated two-lane county road meandering through dry western countryside: southern Colorado/northern New Mexico.   This is my second attempt at the road.  I posted several weeks ago when I gave up with my original plan to use Atlas track to make 'Streets roads. Since then I have removed all of the Atlas track and finished this section complete with terrain.   This road is made with EZ-Street road segments.  I have used only D21 curves, but cut sections in each stock curve section and inserted short straight sections so that, from the standpoint of the tractor trailers I will eventually run on this road, all the curves will look like 27 inch or wider radius to them.  The completed section, show, is only nine feet of road (seventeen and one half lane feet).  I have another 85 lane-feet to go but know now how to build it and that it works. 

 

The technique used to built the road is pretty much as for my city streets as explained in an article in OGR run 256 excep the 1/2 inch gap between the two lanes is filled with auto body filler (Bondo), and there are no parking lanes, just slopeg shoulders that start flush with the road and run out a scale five feet (Bondo covered with fine ballast for for gravel).   The road is crowned a scale 8 inches and deliberately made just a bit wavey and sligthly skewed (not perfectly level side to side) in places so it does not look too perfect, etc.  I tried various colors of paint and settled on that shown, a Benjamin Moore flat wall color called Revere Pewter.  Darker color looks better from the standpoint of making the metal rails less promnient to the eye, but makes the road stand out starkly against the countryside, which is not the look I want.  The road stripes are white, not yellow: this is the mid '50s, nearly twenty years before the Manual on Uniform Traffice control Devices and its yellow lines were adopted nationwide .  I started to install a barbed wire fence about ten feet back from the edge of the road, but didn't like the look - I may revisit that idea later.  There definately will be Burma Shave signs eventually.   

 

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So far, I have less than nine feet of road completed - about 17.5 lane-feet of road, as shown in these two views here.

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But it looks great, the road running through countryside bracketed by train tracks front and in the rear.

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Here is one of my city buses heading uphill (2.5% rise here). (Short videio because it only has eight and one half feet it can go).

And a two axle delivery truck heading downhill. 

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Images (3)
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Videos (2)
Bus on Highway
Lonely Truck
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OK Lee....where is the dust that should be being produced by the vehicles traveling down this road???....OK, I just had to say that!!  I figure that will be your next project!!  Looks great.  Sure wish you would have been able to get your original plan to work since the curves would have been more gradual and broader...but...it looks nice as is!!

 

Alan

Originally Posted by gunrunnerjohn:

Lee, it's been said we learn more from our mistakes than our successes, so the first one was a learning experience.

Yes, that has been said, and it is true.  I learn a lot.  I learn an awful lot!

 

Seriously, I have learn a lot recently on the country roads.  By completing the section shown above and thinking about it, I've planned out how to build the rest in (I hope) less time: those eight feet took close to 30 hours to build - of course realize I also built the terrain around them and filled it it (it was bare benchtop when I started, stripped of everything when I removed the Atlas track). 

 

I plan to share everything I have learned once I have the method perfected. 

Ace - I had about one hundred and fifty feet of the Faller system when I had my N gauge layout.  It is a cool idea - there are no slots, and you can set up the roads for the trucks and buses to follow any type of path on paved or "dirt" roads.  Further, the roads are cheap to build (all you need is that special iron wire, which by the way, is very difficult to cut even with big diag pliers).  I had buses that would navigiate my downtown and stop at corners, tractor trailers, and and I modified a truck to be a garbage truck that would stop at every other house in my subdivision. On one of the rare days when the system was working well it was incredibly cool.

 

But never again.  the most delicate, fussy, problematic stuff I ever had on a layout.  Problems are: 1) the buses and trucks are very expensive, 2)  that would be okay except they broke a lot - I got about 40 hours of running per vehicle before it would die, so I bought a lot of new vehciles all the time 3) I could neve,r ever fix any vehicle when a motor died, a sensor stopped working, it refused to steer any more or whatever, 4) the buses and trucks are rechargeable (two hour charge = 30 minutes running, and they much run too fast (scale 50 mph in town), when fully charged and then sort of linearly slow down to where they are running at the right speed after ten minutes and then barely moving as they go to empty after another fifteen,  and 5) Every so often one of them goes off the reservation, just suddenly lunging over a cliff or in to a building. 

I have wondered if the HO versions would be more robust - they would be twice the scale and so all the parts would be bigger, stringer, easier to repair.  But I decided not to investigate that early on, and just go with 'Streets.  Like almost all O gauge stuff, 'Streets is incredibly robust - durable, repairable, and will run for hours with no supervision.  That is one characteristic of O gauge that I think sets it apart from other scales for me.

 

On the other hand, if Faller ever brought out an O-gauge system, I'd be first in line to try it, I suppose. 

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