One of the things I've always wanted to model is a traction system. Most people know it by the name the trolley or street car. It was one of those things I grew up with in Philadelphia. As I recall, the PTC (Philadelphia Transit Co.) trolley ran on Frankford Ave well into the 1960's. In some other sections of the city you can still ride a trolley.
When we went to visit my uncle we had to go way out the other side of the city. We would take the Frankford "EL" to 69th street and catch the PST (Philadelphia Suburban Transit) which was known locally as the Red Arrow Lines. The Red Arrow part of the ride was my favorite. The cars went fast and were red and cream with the red arrow insignia on the sides, not at all like the too familiar cream over green PTC trolleys. That was long ago, before SEPTA took over all public transit and "Lightweight Rail Vehicles" came on the scene.
Fortunately for me on this project, there are N scale trolleys. I have seen quite a few traction models in 1:160 on the Internet. Some are scratchbuilt, others are modified from factory products. Some even get their power from the overhead wire. Not sure I'll go that far, but I am attempting to incorporate a trolley line into my N scale Allegheny Eastern. The obvious site for this is the Altoona section of the layout. Like most towns back in the day, the city of Altoona had its own trolley line.The Altoona area is served by the Altoona & Logan Valley transit system, now known as ARTA, though for last several decades it has used buses. Unlike Philadelphia where trolleys still run, the last trolley on the Logan Valley ran in 1954. On the Allegheny Eastern it's not 1954 yet, so the trolleys have a reprieve from the scrappers torch.
This is an early mock-up of downtown Altoona when I was just starting to develop the Logan Valley idea. The scene is supposed to be 11th Avenue and 13th Street. The white and red building is the PRR station...
The two PCC cars are supposed to be Logan Valley cars. They should be cream over orange, instead they wear PTC livery. They also should not be PCC cars, Logan Valley used very distinctive double ended trolleys made by Osgood-Bradley.
I may worry about this in the future but I'm quite happy with the cars as they are. Reminds me of Phildelphia.
The track you see is made by a Japanese company called Tomix. It's called Super Mini Tram Track. It comes out of the box looking like a section of city street. The track itself bears some semblance to the "girder rail" used in street trackage. I purchased the 103mm radius curves, which is a tad over 4 inches. Tomix produces double track but it doesn't look like what you see in the mockup. I just set up two single sections and overlapped them when I realized that would look more "realistic". To actually lay track like this would mean carving up lots of new and relatively expensive track sections.
This is what the "starter kit" I purchased looks like...
You can see how the curves contrast with a piece of wider radius Bachmann track. Beneath the tracks is a 1:160 scale drawing of the mockup. Even though the Tomix curve is tight, it's nowhere near tight enough to fit those streets. Working it into a city scape requires a bit of imagineering. The straight sections are fine, just about right in width. It's just those "huge" 4 inch curves. You either have to make your streets wide like boulevards, or find a way to make the track look like it fits narrow streets.
The track snaps together like the Kato or Bachmann products. The seams are almost invisible and the plastic is the color of wet concrete. It would easy to repaint the plastic to look more like a typical city street. Add some details and you can use it as is. The little clips are for holding double track sections together. You would simply buy the 140mm radius track and lay it next to the 103 curve. You can see what this looks like in this image from the Easy Trolley site...
You can get more information on the Tomix products at
http://www.trainweb.org/tomix/ I purchased my track from a store on EBay. You can save some money and not buy the Tomix power supply or the wire leads. I just soldered wire to the bottom of the rails under the plastic. I'm using an old MRC transistor throttle I've had for years.
As you can see from some of the the photos, a Bachmann PCC car can easily negotiate a 4" radius curve. The minimum radius for real street car trackage can go as low as 35 feet. That's about 2 5/8" in N scale. Since I may want tighter curves on the Logan Valley I decided to see just how small a curve these little trolleys can handle....
It turns out that an unmodified PCC car can negotiate a 3" radius curve with no problems. Of course I wrecked a perfectly good set of trolley trucks before I found this out. I listened to somebody that told me I had to tweak them to make the cars follow tight curves. Leave the trucks alone.
I did modify my PCC cars, but not to negotiate tighter curves. There are problems with buying second hand Bachmann products. Things like split gears in both trucks on both models. This causes the drive to lock up and not move anymore. It was sort of a Bachmann "feature". They used to sell things that way. Fortunately the trucks are easy to replace with spare parts from Bachmann. Just make sure you specify that you want the NEW version of the part. Otherwise you may just get another set of freshly split gears.
The other modification had to do with aesthetics. The models just don't look quite right. PCC's ride VERY low. Their trucks are hardly visible from certain angles, as can be seen in this photo of a Johnstown Transit unit...
The Bachmann model, however, looks like the monster truck version of a PCC
This really bothered me, so I changed it. I removed the body shell and cut about 1/16th of an inch or so from the TOP of the chassis. This lowers the body to a more reasonable height.
Warning...Using a hand saw to cut the alloy they use in the chassis will take hours. A Dremel with cutting disk will speed things up considerably. Take your time, however, no use destroying a perfectly good mechanism.
I was not able to get the Bachmanns to negotiate a scale 35 foot curve using the stock trucks. They would just stop dead. As it stands the little beasts will handle a 40 foot curve and that's what they are running on now...
Unlike 80 foot passenger cars, trolleys always look better negotiating tight turns
The Logan Valley is still under development (like everything else here). Right now it loops through downtown Altoona and runs to East Altoona, across the mainline from the roundhouse. That's about 20 feet one way. It loops past the Blair Furnace area and back to Altoona on a parallel track. Unlike the real Logan Valley double ended cars, the single ended cars on the model have to be turned around by using loops
You'll notice I have not included any turnouts, using a "double track" dogbone instead of loops at each end. Trolley turnouts for street trackage are nothing like railroad turnouts. They are single point switches.
Tomix does make turnouts for the Tram track, but they don't resemble the real thing. They remind me of those tight G scale turnouts used in garden railroads. Beyond the streets, trolley lines followed standard railroad practice and the turnouts look the same as any railroad.
I'm temporarily using code 80 track for the trolley line. I thought I could live with it as most of the track will be buried in the street. After working with code 55, the stuff seems absolutely clunky. It's much harder to work with and looks terrible. I'm gonna scrap it and replace it with code 55 on "private" right of way. The Tomix track will work for some sections that run in the streets, but I may need to make something up for tighter curves. The one think I would like to do with the Tomix track is simulate the bricks that were often used around street trackage.
It may be straightforward to apply this detail to the straight sections of track. Curves are a totally different story...The brick courses curve with the track.
While this kind of detail is available in other scales, the trouble is N scale bricks are so small. It might not be possible to replicate brickwork that wouldn't look out of scale. I've looked at some brick sheeting, but it doesn't look like real brick to me. I hear there is a new product coming out that may be just what I was looking for, but I haven't seen it yet. Either way there is still the problem of using brick at curves. I have seen modelers get around this by using "asphalt" at the curves, but I'd rather use brick if I can.
If you'd like more information on trolley modeling check out
http://www.eastpenn.org/index.html, just one many traction modeling sites. A Google search using "trolley model" or "traction model" will turn up all kinds of stuff.
Frank Musick
