The virtual track train (VTT) is a new type of urban transit system with all-wheel active steering technology utilized to make the long combination vehicle run along the planned route (virtual track) like railway vehicles along physical track. This paper proposed a scalable cascade modular path following control strategy for the newly designed gantry virtual track train (G-VTT) based on preview & tracking controller, focusing on the lateral control for low-speed turning manoeuvre. The mathematical characteristics of the 2-norm was utilized to establish a local tracking objective function (LTOF) to find the optimal lateral acceleration (OLA) of the tracking point in the preview window and calculate the optimal wheel steering angle (WSA) to achieve the optimal local trajectory. Considering the lag time Td, the yaw stability and path following ability of the vehicle are contradictory in some cases, so the damping adjustment factor λ was proposed to optimize the damping characteristics and the time-delay stability factor ξ was proposed to evaluate the time-delay stability. The influence of the key parameters, preview time Tp, Td, ξ and λ, on the stability and following ability were analyzed by frequency domain analysis method, and the optimal region of ξ and λ was obtained to instruct the configuration of λ and Tp. Finally, steady-state and dynamic forward predictive models were proposed to compensate for the oscillation caused by the lag time. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, forward predictive models and the configuration method of λ and Tp were verified by theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]