It may never happen, but I hope it does.

Hi Wahiba,

Don't tempt me with trams; my resolution for 2016 is already made: Lancre, the whole Lancre and nothing but Lancre.

That's not to say that I dismissed your suggestion. Kato do a nice line in tram track and also modern 2 car units. Both they and old style 4 wheelers would make a nice urban layout and would be ideal for MERG SuperBloc control.

Just thinking it through a little, the constraint on block length would be braking distance to stop without piling all the passengers on top of the driver. My guess would be 15 to 18ins. I have 16 SuperBloc units, twin oval means 8 blocks per track, that's a total length of 12ft per oval. Squeeze the blocks below 18ins and the trams would run around the edges of a 4ft x 2ft board. That's do-able and could probably handle four or five trams in each direction.

The old style trams relied on their drivers to maintain a safe distance, so here is a more radical option: Ditch all the fixed SuperBlocs and their wiring, just put DC traction current on the track. Put an infrared LED tail light on every tram and an infrared photo transistor on the front. When one tram approaches the tail light of another the transistor switches on and uses a circuit similar to the SuperBloc's to ramp the traction current down to zero at a preset rate. When the transistor switches off, the traction current ramps up again. Electronic drivers, no need for elaborate below baseboard controllers. The track could be laid on a table or the floor when required with no restrictions on size or shape. Put a battery in the tram and you could run dozens of them on the same track. No need for traction wiring then.

If you wanted bi-directional running you could use two pairs of LED/transistor and switch between them with your "two-out-of-three" method of reversing on 3 rail track.

However, this is just casual digression. One layout at a time is enough for me, so it's back to Lancre station now.