Bis:
A model, by dictionary entry means "something that represents something else or the real thing."
maybe its been mentioned, but:
And, There is something called "selective compression" in MRRing. It means that what is represented as the real thing is compressed down in size on the layouts to allow for space limitations.
"selective compression" is your MRRing friend!
For instance, an HO scale baseball field TO SCALE, would take like a 5 foot by 4 foot piece of real estate on a model RR if put down in true exact 1:87 scale! So, if you want one, you "selectively compress" it to about a 81/2x11 inch space {or smaller}.
You don't have to have "adequate parking" in your town. you can "selectively compress" a mini lot with just a row of say, 5 cars in it between the general store and the bank. OR just one side of the street as parallel parking spaces for a few cars.
The Idea is you SUGGEST there is parking downtown for all who need it {wouldn't that be great in the real world!}. You SUGGEST there is a wide 2 lane road in town.
The suggested representation of parking is all you need, so the road need only be wide enough to have 2 lanes of traffic and one row of parallel.. OR just two lanes of traffic and a small municipal lot for parking.
Also, if you want sidewalks, BAM! that takes up more space on each side of the town's roads!!! so limit sidewalks and compress them as well.
Good luck in your "town planning"!
-G .
Just my thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences. Others may vary.
HO and N Scale.
After long and careful thought, they have convinced me. I have come to the conclusion that they are right. The aliens did it.
Southwest Chief- I love your pictures, makes me wish I still lived in Garden Grove so that I could over and look at your layout.
I sure do appreciate everyones input. Thank you all
Bis I am fortunate to live in a small East Texas town with lots of examples around. There is a town to the North of me (Grapeland, pop. about 800) with tracks right down the middle of town. The town looks to have been heavy into the cotton industry back in the day, but the streets are huge and I think they would look funny on my layout not to mention all the real estate they would eat up.
I am fortunate to live in a small East Texas town with lots of examples around. There is a town to the North of me (Grapeland, pop. about 800) with tracks right down the middle of town. The town looks to have been heavy into the cotton industry back in the day, but the streets are huge and I think they would look funny on my layout not to mention all the real estate they would eat up.
I looked at a number of tpwns in the area. The layout of Grapeland looks like the best prototype for what you want.
Grapeland Google screenshot
Here are a couple similar towns in California:
Line Oak
Wheatland - Front street has two travel lanes and angled parking on both sides within 50' of pavement. The little park was the location of the station.
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
Some really useful info here. Thanks DSchmitt for the parking lot diagrams. I'm trying to figure out how to set up the spaces in a parking lot on my layout and those diagrams should be really useful.
Below is a photo of the main street though my town. Sort of going for a route 66 look during the late 1950s. The road is 5" wide and then narrows to 3.5". 5" is pretty good for a two lane road with parallel parking spots on both sides. I use 3.5" width for most of my roads. Looks good to my eye.
I use 3.5" wide roads for residential streets as well:
Matt from Anaheim, CA and Bayfield, COClick Here for my model train photo website
Seems funny, but some of the older small towns where I grew up in SC had wider streets than some of the housing developments today. As mentioned, there are basic rules that are unchanged for years. However for a model RR, often the best rule is what looks "right." Pretty much everything we do is selectively compressed, so compressing our streets fits right in. For example, I live in a pretty basic one story rancher. But if I built it in scale, it would be larger than some of the businesses in my model town.
Thanks everyone for more inputs. They are a big help.
Grapeland is not typical of the towns around here. Almost all of them have a town square with the courthouse in the middle, like Crockett (the town I live near.) and smaller streets, or Palestine to the north that has a large Union Pacific yard and buildings dating back to the 1900's facing the tracks. If I didn't have dial up I would try down loading a satellite image of it.
In general, model railroaders are limited by space. I know I am. I am stingy with the amount of space I will devote to roadways. Most of my HO scale roads are 3 inches wide, and they look fine. There's no room for parking, really, even though I've got parking meters on the sidewalks and I put cars there.
On the other hand, I don't fill my roads with traffic. So, the narrow roads seem a lot less congested, and I can get away with it.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
We just built a new road on our property. It is 20' wide. More of a driveway of course, but we do need to handle a tractor trailer rig on that road. Other roads in town are 40' wide. With sidewalks and boulevards, it might be a 60' wide ROW.
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
I looked at Grapeland on Google Maps:
Main St through downtown appears to be paved approx 60' wide with angled parking on both sides. It appears the only marked spaces are in front of the stores (east side). Outside the businness district the paving narrows to approx 30' thehen quickly to approx 20'.
You could compress the width of Main to 50' and keep the angled parking on both sides or to 40' if you eliminated the space for angled parking on the track side (west side).
Maple St, Chestnut St and W Oak St have approx. 40' of pavement downtown and are narrower in the residential areas. In the residental area Maple St appears to be paved 30' to its east end. The other streets appear to be narrower.
Most of the residental streets appear to be paved little more than 20' wide.
You could probably get away with modeling the 40' steeets 30-35' and 20' wide streets 16-18' wide.
The distances from the houses to the street could probably be resduced 25 to 50 percent.
The area width of the area where the track runs could probably be reduced by 50-percent from 200' to 100' without comprising the effect. This distance could be reduced more if the track ran along the front of the layout with most of this area off the table, or along the back with the area beyond the track dipicted on the backdrop.
One thing I noticed about the town is that there are few curbs and many fewer sidewalks. Is this typical for towns in that part of Texas?
Well, it is nice to model things in their correct sizes, but is that what you really want. I would make them as wide as what looks good and no more. If there are to be cars parked at the side of the road, then it needs to be wider, if not, then narrower might do. Consider making your road with perspective built into it. Choose a point of view, and then make things grow together from that point.
I do not have many roads on my layout yet. My main roads will be 7th Avenue (Yes, in New York City) but I will only model one lane and a parking lane, the rest will be off of the table.
Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn will be modeled as will Franklin Avenue, and Eastern Parkway.
Broadway in the Bronx is modeled, but that is because the elevated subway is modeled above that road.
Thanks everyone for the reply.
My layout is an "L" shape 9X7 1/2 '. I would like a small business area, gas station, general store and so forth and small housing area I have a couple of industries planed. I really don't want an interstate.
Again, thanks for all the help.
Hi!
I spent some of the best times of my life visiting my Grandmom in the 1950s down in Anna Illinois - pop 6k or so.
My avatar is a model of her 4 room house right off the Illinois Central racetrack. IMHO, Anna was a typical midwest country town, with dirt, gravel, tar/gravel, paved, and "brick" streets - the town had them all. The street my Grandmom lived on started as a gravel road, perhaps 2 1/2 car widths wide. Eventually it was tar and gravel, and in the early 60s was paved with asphalt, 3 car widths wide.
The town has a "Main st", with parking on both sides - parking where you pull into the curb. So you basically had two lanes of traffic and two lengths of parking. That was "uptown" and the biggest street by far.
The main highway (Ill 146) was about two truck widths wide. Nearby country roads with any traffic were gravel, and perhaps the width of 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 car widths wide.
Sidewalks were a luxury outside of downtown and the only ones I recall were about 4 feet wide, maybe less. Downtown sidewalks were maybe 10 feet wide or 6 feet and a dirt area of about 4 feet next to the curb.
Remember, in the late '40s and early '50s America was in a great transition from a war economy towards prosperity and the "age of the auto". My point is, pretty much every town was improving their infrastructure during this time.
ENJOY !
Mobilman44
Living in southeast Texas, formerly modeling the "postwar" Santa Fe and Illinois Central
"Standard" road widths have not changed since the 1930-40's. The largest automobiles then were the same size (or even a little larger) than the largest automobiles today. In the 1920's there were some trucks on the roads that would not be legal today because of their width.
This for residential streets. It is from the 1940's. It is "typicial" not "standard and there are many exceptions in the real world:
STREETS_zps82bbd366 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
Minimum recomended sidewalk width 4'. Recommended planting area between sidewalk and steet (if there is a planting area) 3' without trees, 7' with trees.
A few years ago I drove by a house I lived in the 1950's then it had approximately 18' of pavement (for two way traffic) gravel parking areas on both sides (each wide enough to parallel park cars, curb on both sides, planting strip and sidewalk on both sides. It had not changed.
An 18 foot wide dirt road is reasonable for a dirt road in the 1950's, It provides enough width for vehicles traveling in opposite directions to get by each other without too scareing most drivers.
I currently live in a very rural mountainous area of California. While the main County roads are paved 24'-26' wide. There are many miles of unpaved County roads. A few are actually wider than the paved roads (generally due to improvements to facilitate recent logging operations), but most are 10' or less wide with few turnouts. These roads are virtually unchanged since the mid to late 1800's when they were cut through the forest by miners, loggers and farmers in the area.
Dirt roads in the flatlands were generally built wide enough to accomodate twio way traffic.
The following info for parking lots could also be applied to streets.
PARKING2_zpsc18dd086 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
PARKING1_zps01e9fb83 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
Commercial streets would generally be paved wide enough to accomodate 2 or 4 lanes of traffic plus angled parking on both sides although parrallel (0-degree) parking is not really rare. Sidewalks 5' to 10' wide. Probably most in the 5-6' range.
Guess the first question is how small a town? Does it have several down business' or is it just a general store, church and houses. Is the road going through a state highway or a country road?
The little VT town I was raised in, had a general store/post office, church, hotel and a couple of houses, probably 35' across to the lawn on the other side from the store. This was in the center of town where several roads intersected the state highway. As soon as you got beyond the 400' where things met, it was back to 20'-25' wide. This road was not paved until the late 40's early 50', when they bypassed the town.
A slightly larger town I lived in had roads wide enough for two cars to travel and one line of parallel parking, go easy if you met a car while passing a parked car. Side streets a little narrower.
If you have many downtown businesses, does it have parallel or angle parking? Parking one side or both? Sidewalks are usually 6'-8' wide, but there are exceptions.
I think many folks just take a couple of autos or trucks, set them down between the buildings and see how far apart looks good. Older cities tended to have narrower streets.
Good luck,
Richard
I am trying to figure out a town for my HO layout. I am doing the 40's/50's time period and want a small town out in the country. I am not sure how wide most roads are out of town and in town, same way with dirt roads. Also how do you figure out the size of a parking lot and side walks.
I have measured some of the roads around here, example the dirt road I live on is 18 Foot wide. I just not sure what was the standard 60 plus years ago, if there was a standard and what would look good on the layout.
Thanks for any help.