Thinking about how I want to weather a dirt road an loading ramp. Wanting to simulate wheel ruts and stains. For the time frame of about 1945 to 1955, what would be the width of wheel spacing, for a pickup or light truck of maybe one and half ton capacity. Just never even thought about before....
Front axle (two tires) just under five feet, rear axles (duals) just over. https://www.lov2xlr8.no/brochures/internat/47int/47int.html Wheel track is measured tire center to tire center; with duals that means the little gap between each pair of tires.
You can also use one of your model trucks to take measurements. There is a nice video of Kathy Millat on you tube about a muddy road showing how to do it.
Nice truck. Amazing how much information they put in a simple vehicle brochure at the time. At least back then people could appreciate how it was made and how much you could do with it. And most knew what went on under the hood without needing a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics. Today, basically, it's "how fast will it go?".
I have a number of service roads alongside the tracks on my layout. The wheel base on my N scale trucks was close enough to the track gauge so I used a scrap of track to create ruts in some of the roads. This blog post shows this technique: https://palisadecanyonrr.blogspot.com/2017/07/creating-railroad-service-roads.html
It should work. The local railroads used real pickups on the rails. They have a set of track wheels, front and rear, that are raise hydraulically. The regular road tires fit on top of the rails. Haven't seen any in the past 15 years. But then road crossings are becoming very rare.
Boxcab, she is not really posting about model railroading anymore as she moved to a "professional" approach, but what she posted will keep me busy for ages.....
