T-Trak questions

[scott]

So--talking to Jeff at Nat'l Train Day about T-Trak (among other things...) got me wondering about this system, and the pictures on the JRM site look great.

If the "standard" spacing is meant for streetcars and similar equipment, how do people get the Unitrack to look more like street-tracks instead of ballasted heavy-rail tracks?

And (since this was originally a standard for streetcars) are you expected to provide a continuous road connection across the module as well as the rail connection? Is it "bad form" to make a module that doesn't fit a dense urban setting?

Just curious....not planning to buy any track at all, nope, not me.....

[bill937ca]

This is an old T-trak page from Japan, that now appears to be unmaintained.

http://jiisan2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/

Some scenes that show you how these modules can appear.

http://jiisan2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/scene01.htm

http://jiisan2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/galle01.htm

http://jiisan2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/09904502b.htm

http://jiisan2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/09905151b.htm

http://jiisan2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/09902102b.htm

Their spec sheet.

http://jiisan2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/standard.htm

[bill937ca]

Another source of photos

http://www32.ocn.ne.jp/~kouchan_f/module-db.htm

This spec sheet includes Tomix track.

http://image01.wiki.livedoor.jp/y/c/ytmc/7073320d.pdf

A couple more Japanese T-trak pages.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~qn5m-oon/105ryougimachiya.htm

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~qn5m-oon/105ryshinngashi.htm

And a Japanese language T-trak blog.

http://traintrain.jp/blog/detail/mid/2259/date/2008-09-03

[Shashinka]

Yeah, the club was looking to make the entire layout at one point T-trak, but we sorta moved passed that in to a new module system that is going to let us plug our T-trak modules in to it since as far as I know, only myself and Philip are doing T-trak, though I think Curt is also planning to do them. We need to make a few conversion modules so we can go between standards and wide spacing. T-trak seems to be better suited to the Tomix track as they have a road plate system which what the Penn Tram group does.

Anycase, I'm using the wide spacing for my module(s) becasue of the Kato double track pole set my tracks at the alt spacing. BTW: Sorry I missed ya Saturday, I was going to meet Jeff and Curt at Union, but I don't go in there unless it is absolutely a must. Since I was out of town Saturday for the Coast Guard it wasn't possible.

[scott]

Bill--thanks for all the links; lots of good stuff there.

Aaron--yeah, I'm sorry we couldn't meet up, but hopefully next time I'm up that way we can all meet up someplace quieter and more relaxed.

[Shashinka]

Union even on National Train Days is pretty crazy, especially in the basement in the giant food mall.

[scott]

Yeah, my wife and I both agreed that, while it was a good trip, we don't need to repeat the crowd portion of the experience. Quieter meet-ups and more actual train trips would be much better.

[cteno4]

Scott,

for making streets around the unitrak i'm using a system of foamcore, photo board and then inkjet printed art paper.

heres the layers:

• first i put down a layer of 3/16" black (good stiff stuff) foamcore thats cut at a 45 along one edge so it buts up next to the road bed.

• next i use a piece of 020 black photo board on top of the foam core that takes you from the foamcore over to the rails and just on top of the spikes. you get a tiny bow up as the spikes are a tiny bit higher, but i dont mind this as i doubt it will ever be noticeable and in many pictures of japanese streets with street car rails you see a tiny bit of up slope on the pavement just outside the rails.

• on top of all this im using white drawing paper that has some texture to it that im inkjet printing my streets details on. this lets me put down what ever i want for pavement color and texture, road marking, street lines, etc. you can even get fancy and use photoshop to air brush in oil/exhaust marks in the center of lanes, but im experimenting with doing the manually with chalk powders manually then hitting the final thing with some dull coat to fix it.

for between the rails on the straight sections im using 040 x 0.25 styrene strips. they fit right between the rails well and are just low enough to give good clearance for tram/train trucks folks that have done their streets with plaster between the rails all say to make sure to keep the center area below the rail heads as some trams have truck chassis that stick down and can catch on your center street area. I have not decided if im just going to paint the center strip road color or glue on a think paper strip with street color printed on or even do some with a modern cobble stone you see on some street tracks in japan. I got stalled right at doing the roads last fall and have not made much progress on finalizing and laying the final street layer.

the problem with the tomix street sections is they do look a bit plastic to me and i think need a lot of work to make them look nice. also have to decal, paint or sticker down all your road markings. The other problem is that i think the tomix 37mm spacing is too wide for street car scenes i want to do. that spacing works well for trains, but is large for trams not in really big city streets. i like having the trams have only the 18-24" clearance between them! i remember standing on some of the center of the street curb platforms that seemed little wider than my size 14 feet and having trams whoosh by inches from my face! also want to do some narrow little town sections.

doing the unitrak standard spacing makes it just wide enough to get two car lanes on each side of the tracks on the outside (or one lane and a sidewalk or small roadside details) with the track at the standard 1.5" from the front. I actually like the un parallel curves and they are prototypical with some streets having some really odd curves in two track lines. also makes articulated trams do a nice little wiggle and brings out the articulation more! doing the 33mm alternate spacing to get parallel tracks just looks too large and odd to me for the street car stuff. but thats my opinion.

folks in japan have also laid flex track for the curves with standard spacing as well as elaborate cross over points, some really pretty stuff.

we hope to have one whole side of the new jrm layout be mainly city scene that will take having a long row of ttrak butted up against it fit right in when we want to have it all! then we would just have a long straight street with trams and run it with a reversing circuit.

There is a great little reversing circuit that i just ordered (minitronics ru2-1) that i think will be wonderful for ttrak. it has two reversing circuits and 5 stop circuits. you just put photo diodes in the center of the track that detect a train going over it. so basically if you had a long strip of modules and wanted to do a point to point reversing you just have the modules at the end have diodes in them that plug into the reversing circuits and any modules in the center you want to have stops in you just put in diodes in them and wire the to the stop circuits. great thing is the diodes are less than $1 each so you can put them into what ever modules you want then just plug the ones you want to stop or reverse at with any setup into the appropriate circuits of the unit! I am hoping the system works w/o the reversing circuits being tripped so you could just use it to do 5 pauses on a ttrak loop (its not clear if this is possible or not, but ill know when i get it and play with it).

love this idea as it means i can put my ttrak modules on a shelf on the wall and have them operate as a shelf layout as well. if everything has modular plugs then its really flexible to switch things around to make different setups! also allows you to do a display on a table along the wall that is only 1 module deep (ie put presentation material on the front of the table and give some buffer room to problng fingers!)

cheers,

jeff

[scott]

in many pictures of japanese streets with street car rails you see a tiny bit of up slope on the pavement just outside the rails.

You are an extremely observant person.  ;)


Thanks for all the ideas and info--I'm really getting into this idea (but I probably ought to work on our existing layout first....).

[cteno4]

LOL, not a rivet counter by any means though! just nice when you can use the misfortune of the foamcore being just a tad to slim to your advantage!

Something fun to think about for the future! very fun if you find some others in your area that want to get together to run some trains in public or even at each others houses.

also fun as you can work on a module on your desk or even the coffee table while watching tv! no having to lean over the layout. also makes for a really fun scene in a evening or two's work so you get payback fast and if you screw up trying some new technique its on a very small scale to fix or ditch and start over! also lets you do the hyperdetail if you want to on any module and it will be seen! on a larger layout its easy for details to get hidden or be to far to see well or even be in a spot you can easily put it in!

Also going to try and make as many building sets be mini scene modules on top of the ttrak so they can be lifted off and plunked onto the jrm layout or my eventual home layout!

the other cool thing about ttrak is very low beginning investment that you can grow as you go. track cost per module is about $6 for straights and $24 for a set of 4 alternate corners or $56 for a set of 4 standard corners (due to having to but 29 and 45mm straights). or get a reversing circuit and do a point to point!

I also fiddled with using tomix track 103r track and you can make a nice loop back in a 12" square module with standard spacing (ie put two of these at the ends of a set of modules to make it into one continuous loop). rub is that only some trams and almost no larger emus or dmus will run on the 103r. 140r lets most things run, but makes the the module need to be 13.5" deep which is a bit much if this was to fit on a book shelf (the rest of my modules are max 12.25" deep) so that may be out, but i may still fiddle with some flex track to see if 10" radius will work with the quipment i want to run and just barely fit on a 12.25" module. i like the reversing circuit with the stops as it could make a very fun and animated bookshelf display when not doing something else and everything would run!

cheers,

jeff

[Bernard]

Jeff - you ordered the miniatronics deluxe auto reversing unit? I can't wait to hear how you like the operation of it.
 
When you use the styrene strips with the foam core do you have any problems with it staying in place? Why I ask this is because I use creative foam for my roads and tried thin styrene strips for the center lines and within time they peeled off. It might be different with foam core.
And thanks for the detailed instructions on making roads, this might solve a problem for a removable hatch I need to revise with a road on top of it.

[cteno4]

Yeah, the club was looking to make the entire layout at one point T-trak, but we sorta moved passed that in to a new module system that is going to let us plug our T-trak modules in to it since as far as I know, only myself and Philip are doing T-trak, though I think Curt is also planning to do them. We need to make a few conversion modules so we can go between standards and wide spacing. T-trak seems to be better suited to the Tomix track as they have a road plate system which what the Penn Tram group does.

Dmitry has a bunch of modules also and so does gyula. mine have track down and started working on the streets and buildings but not all together yet! dimitry has made standard/alternate conversion modules and i also plan on making a set.

We had thought of doing a separate layout that was to be ttrak in the front and a 6" wide module set behind it with double viaduct raised on it for shinkansen lines (like 3x ttrak module length modules). the viaduct modules would have simpler scenery on them and we would rely on the front set of ttrak modules to carry the detail. we were thinking alternate spacing for the ttrak to allow interurban or even express trains to run on them. then maybe along one side have an additional row of standard spaced modules with street cars with point to point reversing circuits. started to get to be too many parts and we decided to go sectional instead and have the option of running a row of ttrak street car modules along the city edge and we could even do another side/corner with alternate spacing with other equipment. also the new sectional plan will let us fill in around the edges and corners with just diorama modules if we want to increase the scene simply. basically we wanted more flexibility in the system.

cheers,

jeff

[cteno4]

Jeff - you ordered the miniatronics deluxe auto reversing unit? I can't wait to hear how you like the operation of it.
 
When you use the styrene strips with the foam core do you have any problems with it staying in place? Why I ask this is because I use creative foam for my roads and tried thin styrene strips for the center lines and within time they peeled off. It might be different with foam core.
And thanks for the detailed instructions on making roads, this might solve a problem for a removable hatch I need to revise with a road on top of it.

Yep the RU2-1, cant wait to play with it myself! looks to be the right combo of features and price for me and the ttrak. i love that you can just buy more photo diodes and then pop them in any module you want to have a stop point in and just plug the ones in whatever setup you do into the controller!

sorry i dont use the styrene for line stripping i use it to create the chunk of road between the rails. the 040x.025 stock is just right to fit between the spikes perfectly on unitrak and the 040 height is just below the rail heads with a tad to spare if i want to glue down paper with printed road surface on it. if not ill just paint it the same color as the road surface directly. figure this should work well as the chunk or road between the rails is usually a different material even than the rest of the road way on a lot of japanese tram lines. the styrene is attached directly to the unitrak (white glue so it can come up easily if need be).

my first thought was fun foam to put between the rails but there are a few problems with it for there, first is its a tad thick for there, its hard to cut long, super straight think pieces needed, cranky glueing sometimes (as you noted), and stock only 12" long and you need 12.125" for a module!

I had thought about the fun foam for the roadways and doing that cool painting technique where you paint it then come back and push on it to create nice roadway cracks and such (are you doing this?), but this would the require painting, stickering or decaling the road marks and i wasnt into that for the 18' of current module roadway i have in process with the ttrak modules! also the 12" stock length is a problem

the other option for road lines is good old pin tape, but that can be a royal pain to get nice and straight and is harder to find these days than it use to be (drafting was its biggest user and thats gone these days with computers!).

I love the idea of fiddling on the computer to plan each module's road section and printing out tests and just laying it down to see what works. i have been trying to come up with an alternating pattern of cross streets and alley ways so that it will be prototypical some and also make it so i can mix and match for cross streets. all of my city modules are full 12" depth so the cross streets can go all the way through to the module on the other side.

Big challenge is the standard corner track shape to build roadway around. it going to be tough to cut out the pieces to butt up against the track well and do the center track portions! i have been procrastinating on this for a while now as i noodle things over. one thought is to hide part of the end corners under a freeway or train overpass. another problem is that you have the corners all in roadway then you end up with a lot of street (pretty much most of a 12" sq modules worth) to deal with. thinking that one end may be a large diagonal 3-4 lane each way express way cutting through that the curves loop through in the center of the big intersection. the hard thing is that trams dont usually loop back in a street like this. they usually only do a 90. to distract from this one idea would be to only loop back the inner track and let the outer track go straight on out and then have single track ttrak modules that go out into a more suburban and rural theme and then have a ballasted 180 out there to bring the outer track back.

another is to have two diagonal streets crossing on the end curve so you dont see the tram after it goes into the second 90 as there will be buildings in the way. kind of what philip has done on his most recent alt corner here

http://japanrailmodelers.org/photos/_ttrak-philip/pages/page_40.html

lots of fun little scene challenges but thats why i like ttrak so much doing the japanese tram/street car scenes as there are such a cool variety of things to do with it. just need the time to play more with it, life and work have been too busy lately!

cheers,

jeff

[cteno4]

update the unit should arrive the end of the week, so i hope to have a report on it later next week!

cheers,

jeff

[Tenorikuma]

FYI, the July issue of the Japanese magazine RM Models has an insert booklet on T-trak, showing step-by-step instructions on how to build a module and providing extra information on T-trak variants.

[cteno4]

also some more info on building module bases on this thread

http://www.jnsforum.com/index.php/topic,1061.0.html

more info on the ru2-1 reversing circuit on this thread (jump down through the blood, puss, and scars...)

http://www.jnsforum.com/index.php/topic,1255.0.html

cheers

jeff

[scott]

through the blood, puss, and scars...)

:-P

[Mudkip Orange]

Godzilla has some competition!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mweltephoto/2729243535/in/set-72157612216384025/

[Bernard]

Godzilla has some competition!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mweltephoto/2729243535/in/set-72157612216384025/

Is that the "Toxic Avenger?"

[cteno4]

Is that the "Toxic Avenger?"

LOL, he might beat godzilla to death with king kong's arm!

hulk vs godzilla, one godzilla belch and the hulk is burnt toast...

cheers

jeff

[Shashinka]

Wasn't Godzilla the protagonist in Kiss Saves Santa Part 2?

[PC]

There are several ways to make roads. On TTrak modules, the most common method I've seen is to cut out pieces of plastic sheet to fill the gaps between the tracks. You could also use plaster or the rubber road mat stuff made by some German companies.

There is no standard road interface, and no there are no rules about what type of scenery is appropriate. More rural scenes are certainly not bad form.

Cheers,
Philip

[scott]

Is T-Trak "alternative" spacing the same as that for doubletrack Unitrack?

[David]

Yes, the "official" alternative spacing is 33mm, which is based on Kato's standard for track seperation (double track, plate track, cross-over switch, #4 switch, station gutter).

Interestingly the UniTram track has both spacings - the main UniTram spacing is T-Trak 25mm, while on curves it expands to the Kato/alternative  spacing of 33mm.

[scott]

Great--thanks!

Having weird layout ideas is so much more fun than my actual responsibilities...   

[cteno4]

its confusing for some as the 'standard' ttrak spacing is two pieces of unitrack with the roadbed butt up against each other. this was to make it closer to streetcar spacing and fit on an A4 piece of paper with enough room for some modeling. later the 33mm standard unitrak spacing was done for north america and called the 'alternate' spacing! most japanese stuff is in the 25mm standard spacing as most is streetcar. in na most all is alternate spacing for running large trains on little modules.

it is interesting that the kato unitram track is 25mm spacing on the straights but goes out to 33mm in the middle of the curves!

cheers

jeff

[westfalen]

For those interested, the Australian T-TRAK standards can be found here under 'guidelines' on the left. http://users.picknowl.com.au/~austnscale/austtrak.htm
We use the 33mm alternative track spacing as standard.

[Mudkip Orange]

25mm is actually more prototypical for commuter rail spacing. 33mm "looks" right because the proportions between the track gauge and the track spacing are close to Japan's 1067mm systems. But if you look at the 1435 systems you'll see the track is "squished" together, just like 25mm T-track.

25mm @ 1:150 = 3.75m = 12'4".

And in the US, substantial portions of the NEC are 13', which is 3.96m or slightly less than 25mm @ the American 1:160.

So you see, if you're willing to have prototypical curve radii (i.e., 108" radius for mainline track), 25mm is appropriate for everything from a Keihan or Keikyu EMU to the ACELA.

[dat7719]

T-TRAK is not just for trams, but for most Japanese passenger units, other than Shinkazes.  There are two spacings, 22mm and 33mm(double Track Kato).  I use the 33mm.  If you wanted tram operation, then you would fill in between track and cover the ties, I use foam sheets, which I purchase from art supply stores.  When painted has the texture of either concrete or tarmac. 

The new Unitram track could also be used as it is compatible with unitrack.

[dat7719]

The US T-TRAK standard is at
http://www.t-trak.org/
They also sell kits for the modules.
Dale A. Tripp
www.daletripp.com

[cteno4]

yeah the 33mm spacing does work well for commuter and express trains and you get better curves for the longer cars to make easier. one of the jrm members has quite a few japanese modules at 33mm spacing for commuter and express. he is also a member of a local ntrak club so went 33 also so he could interoperate with their modules easily. most all NA clubs have gone 33mm, almost never hear of other 25mm folks out there in NA. lots of alternate folks hate the odd 25 corner track geometry

http://www.japanrailmodelers.org/photos/_ttrak-philip/index.html

the 33 was just too wide for me for doing trams. the 25 feels much better for trams and having tighter roads and trams passing closely buy each other. kato went 25 for the unitram i think because most all the ttrak i have seen from japan is the 25 spacing as that was the standard lee got going there first. 25 corners just didnt fly in NA as most did not want to do trams, but bigger trains and thus the 33 alternate standard pretty much became the NA defacto standard. always folks in NA grumbling the names should be switched as they think theirs is the standard, but i woul bet there are 10x the ttrak modules in japan an most all of them 25!

interesting kato went out to 33 on the curves though as that could allow interesting transitions. only problem is the transition needs to be made either on an S curve or very odd corner module. but at seeing the cost for the unitram pieces coming out im doubting a lot of folks are going to do unitram for ttrak as it works out to like $60 per module and they dont have the correct lengths yet to do standard length ttrak modules. nothing stopping you from making 248mm modules just need to pair them up in a layout or stretch out 5 of them to make 4 standard 310 modules. also its not all that hard to make roadways on the straight sections its the curves that are the killers so i expect the unitram may be used a lot on corner modules with street car scenes.

cheers

jeff