hi,
looking at a lot of designs i sometimes see a roadcrossing every feet. Take e.g. Tony Koester's Wingate plan or in 102 Realistic Track Plans the station between Mineola and Oyster Bay on page 25. I could make a really long list. Nobody can say Tony Koester is just doing some thing.
On other pictures i often see "city" blocks just one building wide. And often every street has its own crossing.
So my question is: is this typical or not uncommon? Or is this the result of (to) much selective compression?
My home town, Bussum in the Netherlands pop 40,000, is laced with frequent road-railcrossings, we have 8 of them; but they all are at least a 1500 feet apart. Real railroads would prefer to have no railcrossings at all. In another thread about switchbacks some one wrote: switching has to be challanging but not tedious. Adding roadcrossings can make the switchjob even more difficult.
have fun, keep smiling
Paul
I think this is a matter of selective compression to fit the space - not prototypical at all to have a city block that is only one building wide and a road crossing at every street.
In a case like this, it might be better to put a "frontage road" along side the track and cut down on the number of road crossings.
Something to consider too is whether you're going to have electric crossing protection or not (flashing lights). Having three or four sets of signals flashing and ringing at the same time could get to be very distracting, not to mention expensive.
U.S. perspective here - It varies from town to town and also over time, and also if the railroad was there first or early in the town's history (the town streets were planned around it). In town where I live and neighboring ones, some roads that originally had grade crossings were dead-ended at the railroad for one reason or another.
I would suggest using our friends Google & Bing Maps. If there's enough resolution in the town you're modeling, you can use the scale to get a measurement between streets.
Since I'm freelancing my town, my rule of thumb was two town buildings back to back + alley between them + two sidewalks. I only have one grade crossing, as my other streets dead-end at the railroad (my visible streets run perpendicular to the tracks - that's the look I was after)
Definitely varies from town to town. My home town has a 9 mile stretch of East-West track that varies from over a mile between crossings, several stretches of parallel road along side the track, to crossings a block apart for several streets. In fact, a couple decades ago, the crossing on the main street was replaced with an overpass. The North-South rail line, different road, in about a 4.5 mile stretch, has maybe 6 crossings and 2 overpasses. And, several of the blocks are a single industrial building long.
Another nearby city has 6 miles of ROW going through it without a single grade crossing I'm aware of. I know of about 4 bridges taking street traffic over the rail, and through the main business part of town, the track is on elevated embankment with several traffic underpasses.
Searching long enough, one can probably find a prototype for almost everything.