Paving Young St. & Ocean View Ln.

I've been 'paving' Young St.*, Ocean View Ln.*, and the area between them for the last two weeks. Not eight hours a day, just an hour or so at a time. The area beyond Ocean View Ln. will be open country, looking out to the ocean of course, and is planned for landscaping sometime in the months ahead. 

I won't go into a step-by-step, but will just note some points and improvements from lessons I learned from my previous streetcar layouts. 

The roads, sidewalks, and building pad area are built up from layers of cardboard, foam board, matte board, balsa, and styrene. I used what I had in my leftovers. If I was buying everything new, and specifically for this job, I'd buy one material in various thicknesses and stick with it.

Historical lesson #1: Instead of using glues to hold the layers in place I used transfer tape. This is not the least expensive way to go, but on previous layouts I experienced glue induced layer warping and distortion, especially with styrene glues. With transfer tape there isn't any distortion when bonding pieces, dissimilar materials bond together with ease, and the bonds are immediate. In the future I may regret using transfer tape, but on other projects that are a few years old, the bonds are still good and solid.

Historical lesson #2: On previous layouts I tried very hard to get the paving sheets right up flush with the railhead to mimic as best I could the surface on a Toronto street. The problem was that small warps, and imperfect sheet bonding, would often cause the road to protrude above the rail head, which would lift the wheels of passing streetcars and cause stalling. Fixing that was always a royal pain and discouraged me from running vehicles. This time I made sure all paving sheets were well below the railhead. This makes for a slightly less realistic street, but lets the streetcars run without problems.

Historical lesson #3: This is more of a planning thing, but I made sure the paved area didn't have any switches. I use standard Atlas switches, and feel they don't look good when paved into a street. Not to mention that lots of care is required to make sure they don't get fouled during paving. If I were to have switches in the paved area they'd need to be proper streetcar-style ones.

On each side of the layout there're two open areas of track between the roads that haven't been paved. These will be grassed in, and there will be low walls on the building pad side to prevent pedestrians from wandering onto the track.

*Young St. is a play on Toronto's Yonge St. Mine will capture some of Toronto's Yonge St. buildings of old, as well as a few that appear elsewhere in the city. So, my street is a free interpretation, hence Young and not Yonge. And Ocean View Ln., which is OVL de-acronymized? OVL, oval: is the layout type coded in the street name. Ok, you're right, I need more coffee :-)