Getting very frustrated

I am getting very frustrated, for 3 days, I got absolutely nowhere with this rack system. A colleague of mine from Singapore has made a new rack for me, and it has significantly reduced the amount of textures by using transparencies. The first photo shows the rack. However, when I bend it using Object Bender to use it for curves, it is still too texturally heavy, and even if I reduce each segment down to 1 metre, it is still ridiculously slow. The second photo shows a curved rack with length of 5 metres, and this has taken Object Viewer about 2 minutes to load.So I'm back to square 1, and decided that it might be better for me to do signals first. As they always say, "The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray, and leave us naught but grief and pain for promised joy". My plan to create a good looking rack and pinion railway has gone nowhere but down the drain. I am very depressed now :'( .