lol, neon gates, i know someone who also has them on a coaster,
anyways, if you're using the OC, you should make different 'brusch' for the every pole and every neon-bar, you can't make some parts of a texture transparent and leave the rest visible,
You need to make each one of the bars a separete brush in the object creator. Then put them together to form your gate. Then you only need to texture the bars the color you want and they will be 3d.
Yes, that's what I mean by making it 3d. But be sure to optimize in OC, and you may want to use anim8or to do material settings as OC's is very limited. Using singled color texture files is not practical at all. Just keep it 2d by editing the env file if you want to keep it simple and not spend all that time worrying about stuff.