"Railway Lines on the Table" Topic

I now have a couple of respectable opposing forces for WW2 in Europe. However, so far, none of their battles have included railway lines and this cannot go on. I therefore wondered how people model such features on their tables. Mine is made up of terrain tiles with roads and water features imbedded. However, my initial thoughts are that railways tend to be above the surface of the land other when they are going through cuttings etc.

Therefore, am I better modelling the rails separately (up a bit on ballast etc) and just laying them down as extra terrain features like buildings? Or should I create a series of new terrain tiles in the same way as for roads and rivers etc? What do people advise?

How often do you plan to use them? Will they be an influential terrain piece, e.g an embankment or a cutting or a bridge. How you intend to use them will influence your design.

I don't use tiles, but have railway track on raised beds to just lie down across the table. It provides a nice low view block and defensive cover too. For use with 28mm, I picked up S scale track which looks better than O scale where the spacing between the rails is wider than the people are tall.

The raised embankment also allows it to line up better with a railway bridge.

Eventually I would like to do cobblestone roads with rails embedded. I'll use HO for that as the interurbans that went all over the Netherlands were 1m gauge.

We use railway lines a lot.
They make a good visual alternative piece of scenery to roads too.
in 15mm I usually make 12'and 6" strips narrow 3mm thickness plastic card . Glue TT rail track on top.

We use them in Fighting for Mexico, Civil War battles, PBI, Sudan ,AK47 et al

link to show the pieces in situ

martin

Once i get my trains painted uo I'll add rail lines.

For 15mm – -I tend to use N-Scale track on a roadbed and then on the table like a road or fence

We have used them in battles in Western Europe (France 1940) and in North Africa (Torch Landings and follow on battles).

I bought several pieces of HO track for when I ran a game on the ACW battle of Olustee. I just laid it on the mat I was using as Olustee is flat as an ironing board. Looked fine.

A little use in microscale, and always laid on rather than sunken in. Those embankments are cover, after all, and used that way from the ACW on. My thought would be to lay them on and only build special terrain tiles with cuttings if you run into a historical scenario which requires them. (If you never find such a historical scenario, you never needed them in the first place.)

My very unresearched impression is that cuttings have gotten more common post-war. There's more money, and making the rail line quieter and less conspicuous has gotten to be more of a concern.

I had a train in a 54mm Army Men game. One player's had an O-gauge toy train, so we had it all.

I've looked for one for myself, but they're ridiculously expensive. Considering making one using paper printed models glued to chipboard, if I need one again. Cheers!

I have rail lines or both my 6mm and 15km stuff. I just lay them on. In many historical engagements they are important terrain features.

All excellent advice. Many thanks. It looks to me that I can build some lengths and junctions to lay down over the existing tiles and I can see how that would work with crossing and bridges on existing roads and rivers. Good point from Robert. I will only worry about cuttings and tunnels if they come up for a specific scenario.

I game such things nowadays in 12mm so KATO unitrack is ideal, comes on its own ballast so no effort required. I did do some fold flat track for 1/72 with embankments but it rarely got used.

Note railways only normally go up about 2% gradients, certainly in WW2 in the UK. We do have sections where trainls were hauled up much steeper gradients using stationary steam engines and were still working in the UK till 1963.

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The upshot is that the optimum is to lay them flat on the table. You can have embankments but remember there radius is large and so depending on your ground scale may well be close to straight. A quick look at an OS map indicates a "Sharpe Bend" of about 45 degrees takes over half a mile. Modern track may reduce that a bit being "super elevated" (banked) but that seems to come later.

Good points. Thanks.

These are perfect for 1/300th 6mm.

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This is what I use.

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In the past I used the Flames of War train tracks for 15mm and 20mm.

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Would FOW tracks take standard HO rolling stock?

Don't know. You will have to ask FOW. They are advertised as 15mm. Which is why I bought them.