Plateways - the type of rail the team found, with the flange on the rail. Unfortunately, they were cast iron and subject to breakage
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Get going, model railroaders. We expect to see plateway layounts in a couple of years!
Plateway layouts? Are you going to design bui8ld, and patent a scaslr-model mechanical horse for motive-power?
Or expect the specific plateway model-railroader to employ trained mice, his pet dog or cat?
Pretty sure plate-railways vanished prior to steam.
Any road locomotive will run on a plateway, just as any road wagon can, if the vehicle track (here meaning lateral wheel spacing) is suitable. So anything Trevithick built for the road would work; any locomotive with its flanges removed would work -- in fact the breakage problem is less because the contact patch can be wider and even a little compliance in the tread or between tire and wheel solves most of the plate breakage.
If grasshopper rodwork isn't challenging enough... build Brunton's Mechanical Traveller.
Plate railways diisapeared before steam replaced railroad animal mlotive-power and long before internal-combustion vehicles replaced road animal motive-power.
Still, this was the very-first example of rail-highway intermodal!
Wagons had to be lof the right gauge.
Why not build a plate railway as your garage entrance istead of a paved driveway?
daveklepper Why not build a plate railway as your garage entrance istead of a paved driveway?
Who will be the first railfan with a useful plate railroad?
Please post photos after you build and use it.
My grandparents built a house (20 Gershom Place in Kingston, PA) in the early 1930s that had a driveway consisting of two parallel lines of long concrete slabs with a grass 'median' in the center. (This was not uncommon in that era with grass or gravel; the idea was that any oil leaks would drop into the middle and not stain pavement.)
As a guide going into the garage at the end, he had curbs on the outside edges of the slabs, functioning exactly as outside-flange plateways...
Wonder who owns the house now. and if the concrete plate-railroad is still there?
If I were in a position to implement the idea, I'd do it and make it look as authentic as practical.The actual materials might reflect improved technology.
The house is owned by the same family that bought it after Agnes flooded it 8' deep -- and they say they will be passing it down the generations. Incidentally they have now been in it nearly a quarter-century longer than my grandparents were there!
And the driveway remains impertinently grassed in the middle, with guide curbs...
I can easily make Stampcrete molds and appropriate colorant for structural-grade concrete that will duplicate either painted or unpainted cast-iron...
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