Originally Posted by
SweetLou
The San Jose method seems pretty good. It seems like anytime you need to cross the rails, you will be doing it near perpendicular. It sounds like the plan for my hometown will be more like Little Rock's though. It will be going from the river, through town then up to the university. Coming from the university is a long steep hill. There are no wide roads up the hill, so I assume they will be just adding the tracks to the narrow lane. To widen the road would cost a lot of money, where they could. A lot of excavation of the hill would need to be done. Also this is kind of an older area and there is just no room to widen the roads without tearing down the houses.
There is quite a bit of work to do to the street anyway, streetcar tracks need a concrete foundation, the cars are quite heavy and the contact points are small, essentially they dig out the street, any utilities that are directly below where the tracks need to be are relocated to the sides, digging up the tracks for a watermain repair is NOT an option. Now you fill in all the holes, putting a concrete footing under where the tracks go, on top of this you place railway ties, sometimes they use metal, sometimes treated wood, the tracks go on top of this, usually continuous welded rail, you bury the whole thing up to the tracks in concrete. The road on either side is also often concrete underneath so that the whole thing doesn't settle at different rates, which would produce a major traffic hazard. All this takes months or years even when the street is either closed or you need detour lanes. The road allowance is probably a lot wider then you think, it's been common for at least the last 75 years or so, to make the road allowance for a 2 lane road, a chain (~66') wide. Within this chain width you have the road lanes, the sidewalks, utility poles, utility lines and anything else the city needs, and typically there is 3' of working space on either side.