In the past I tried to model a street in Fleetwood as a static tramway display. I made mistakes, so I’m starting again.

This time it is a 1185x190mm shelf plank, and is being planned before I start gluing stuff down.

As before, all the buildings will be Metcalfe kits, specifically the PO274 00/H0 Scale Low Relief Red Brick Terraced House Fronts, PO272 00/H0 Scale Low Relief Red Brick Shop Fronts, modified PO263 00/H0 Scale Corner Shop Red Brick kits, but also including whatever bits and bobs I have left over from other projects.

The first thing to work out, is how much space the buildings will take up out of my 190mm. As I already know that it is about 4mm from base level to the top of the rails, I’ll add that into my profile diagram:

This leaves 116mm for the road/tramway area.

OO Gauge track, from the outsides of the rails is 19mm across (inside, 16.5mm). The Sleeper width is 29mm, but that is for later.

Looking at North Euston Street (my sort-of prototype), the rails are about 4m from the kerb (according to Google Earth):

4 metres in real life, is 52.5mm in OO. I’m calling it 50mm.

This will push my track too close to the front edge of the board.

This is going to be inaccurate, but artistically I think it will still work if there is enough space for the tram to pass a badly parked Transit.

So, 40mm it is! It would need to be wider if I weren’t only going to be classic trams on this. The Streamliners (Balloons) are 7’6″ wide, but the Flexity 2 trams are 8’9″ wide (Sod the Flexities, I could them more as EMUs than trams).

Track separation next. How far apart are the lines? Well, I had to go by eye on this. I just looked at what would be a suitable gap and went for that. 21mm looked right.

So that’s the plan. Obviously I have to check these measurements with a mock-up before I start cutting things to the wrong size.