city streets

[Anonymous]

What is a good method to make city streets / sidewalks?

[Anonymous]

I've had pretty good luck with the Woodland Scenics products. They work well if you have a lot of streets and sidewalks. I've mastered the concrete, but I am still looking for the best way to perfect the aged asphalt look as the Wooldland Scenics Asphalt results in a look of fresh just steam rolled asphalt. If anyone has any weathering tips, I'm am all ears!!!

[Anonymous]

what specific Woodland Scenic products?

[Anonymous]

I have used both poster board and foam core for my roads with good success, the poster board is much thinner so you have to think about the thickness of the ground cover that will lead up to the road. For city streets I go with the posterboard, make it wide enough for your sidewalks to be put ontop of the poster board. I cut out the poster board and blue it down using white glue. Make sure you get the glue to the outside edges so it will not lift. Then I scribe in the concrete lines, for my roads I use one and half inches in width and two and one halve in length to mark out the concrete slabs. Once the road is dry I then add my sidewalks by gluing either another layer of posterboard or evergreenstyreen either 10 thou plain cut to width ( I use 3/4 in) or there sidewalk material. I then paint it with woodland scenics concrete st1454 or if you want a more of a darker concrete ( like a wall) I use creamcoat's lichen gray. Let the paint dry overnight, then I come back and run a pensil through the scribed lines. Then one trick I have learned is to take a piece of blackboard chalk, white, and drag it down the length of the street. It will give you that white look. You can take your fingers and blend it in. Next comes the earth colored chalk or colored pensils, depending on what you prefer, I like the pensils myself, this is used to put car tire lines in etc. Just keep slowly working at it and you will get it.
For asphault roads I use the thicker foam core as I use wood putty to build up the sides and my ground cover is usually a little thicker in these areas, I paint my road with a asphault gray paint, it does come out a touch darker but again I go over it with the blackboard chalk and this tomes it down, depending on the amount of chalk applied. You then can take a exacto knife and carve in your cracks etc and use a thickened dark paint to put down your sealed crackes etc. If you have not doe this process before, take a scrap piece of your base board ( 6 in by 4 in or so) and make a short street with sidewalks, practice with this, keep some notes and then you will be able to go back when adding to your layout and say what worked and what you did or did not like. Hope this helps, enjoy. Ron..

[Anonymous]

Wow--you commentary was great. I am going to print it out for future reference. I hadn't thought about using white chalk.

[Anonymous]

Randy:

Woodland Scenics has a street and sidewalk product including foam tape for molds and plaster for the street/sidewalk. They also have a coloring in concrete and asphalt colors. However, the asphalt has the color of fresh asphalt. Lokk at the following message which discusses how to weather this with white chalk.

Jim

[Anonymous]

Hey Ron I've used the same system to make streets and sidwalks for years. But...let me take it one step further. After the steets and sidewalks are in place coat them with a thin coat of Durhams Water Putty (available at hardware stores). This will give you a very realistic concrete texture and in fact its a good texture for modeling asphalt too. You can even make realistic cracks in it by pressing on it after it has dried hard. As you stated chalks and pastels are the way to go.I've never seen a "concrete" paint that looked realistic.

As to the color of asphalt..... Asphalt fades rather quickly to a dark dirty grey color with the darkest area being in the center of the street and lighter toward the edges. Don't forget about oil spots from leaking vehicles generally in the center of each lane. I've found that its easier to start with a white surface and use chalks and pastels in varying shades of grey and black to obtain the desired effect. Vic

[Anonymous]

What's up? - I've gotten the new asphalt look by sanding down cork roadbed so the street has a crown, then I spray it in flat black. I also use chalk to weather it.I have even used chalk for sections of the road stripes, run a car over it and then into the lane to simulate those guys we all know that drive into that wet paint. mmm

[Anonymous]

What's up? - I've gotten the new asphalt look by sanding down cork roadbed so the street has a crown, then I spray it in flat black. I also use chalk to weather it.I have even used chalk for sections of the road stripes, run a car over it and then into the lane to simulate those guys we all know that drive into that wet paint. mmm

[Anonymous]

AMI instant roadbed is great!

[Anonymous]

If a street is 22 feet wide how wide is it in HO scale? In books I've read one author used 2 and 3/8" for 22 feet
and another guy said 2 and 3/4" for 20 feet! My calculator gives me 3" for 22 feet!

Thanks,

Chris. Spratt
Victoria, BC

[Jetrock]

A 22 foot wide roadway would work out to just a smidgen over 3' wide in HO.

I've been putting off my streets for a while, since my track is located in the streets it's a bit more work. The bits outside the track will be black cardboard painted Aged Concrete with a foamcore base (the foamcore is already down) and the bits in between the tracks will be .020" styrene on a stripwood platform to raise it to just under track level. The real pain will be the switches, which will all need to be hand-filed. I'm using just one brand of switch (Peco "Setrack" and "Streamline" short-radius) which means I'll only need two patterns, and can just make copies.

[Anonymous]

Jetrock,
Please don't take this personally. Everyone makes typo's!!

When I read your post which started out "A 22 foot wide roadway..." and ended with "...over 3' wide in HO" I knew you meant inches but this caught my funny-bone and I started to laugh until I had tears in my eyes. You have started my day off with the best laugh that I've had for a long time - THANKS!!

You have contributed many great posts and ideas so please keep posting. I DO enjoy reading your posts.

I do have a question though: If your road is 3 feet wide then where do you put your RR? [:)] ROFLOL [:)]

[dehusman]

A 22 ft wide street would be 22 HO ft wide. (buy a scale ruler you'll use it more than you realize).

Dave H.

[Anonymous]

Found, by accident, the following:
per lane:
City streets 8' wide
rural and main city 10' wide
Highways 12'

So a 20' road would be a 2 lane main city street, without parking, more commonly, there would be parking, so you'd want more like 32-36' fro your street. Unless it's a back street, then 20's would be right, as they are unlined.

As for what to use for a road, I'd use Cork, you can bevel it a little to show the proper grade, the you can (depending how old the street is) you can create the wheel bevels from the traffic. Once you have that, I'd spray it semi-dark gray, then with a fine point on the airbrush, go down the middle and spray it black. add any other effects (lines, oil line, skid marks, ect.) then coat t with a thin coat of dullcoat and you'll have a decent looking road.

Jay.

[DSchmitt]

Today a "minimum standard" street in California would be two paved 12' lanes, two 8' paved shoulders (to face of curb) and two 5' sidewalks (face of curb to back of walk). A rural road or highway would be 12' lanes, 8' shoulders and 2' shoulder backing (gravel).

In California right of way widths for roads have traditionally been been 30' or 40' for minor roads, 50' or 60' for more important roads, 80' or 100' for major roads.

Of course many (maybe most) highways, roads and streets are not "standard"

[Anonymous]

Greetings,

I have used Durhams Water Putty (available at hardware stores) with great results.

It is great for many projects.

Mark in Texas

[Jetrock]

snake: Curse that darned Shift key!

Consarned if I know why I thought I was modeling in 1:7.25 scale all this time!

Regardless of the "official" dimensions of a roadway, it can still be "selectively compressed" into a smaller width. Roads near the close edge of a layout can be closer to "actual size" (although you can get away with only modeling half of the road if it's a road paralleling the edge of the layout--just put the crown of the road on the edge of the table!) and ones farther away can be narrower, to create a sense of forced perspective.

I've got a scale ruler but, to the best of my knowledge, nobody makes a scale yardstick (well, maybe one could make a 3 HO foot long "yardstick" for their layout out of stripwood--I mean a 36" long real-world, 261 HO foot long, one.) So I still end up calculating a lot of scale measurements from inches or centimeters or whatever side of the yardstick is facing down.

And, to answer your other question--if your road is too wide, put the railroad on the road!! That's what I'm doing--road surface and a few lawns will be my layout's primary scenery other than structures.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Jetrock
[And, to answer your other question--if your road is too wide, put the railroad on the road!!

Or better yet, run it down the middle of the road. one direction of traffic on one side, other direction on the other side of it.

Jay

[Jetrock]

Exactly. There are a number of ways I'm doing it--the current section is double-tracked, with one direction on either side (although switching moves and taking sidings might interfere with this) while others will be a single track running down the middle of the street (which happened here in sacramento, on Stockton Boulevard--it must have been unnerving to drive down the street with a freight train running right there in the middle of the street with nothing but a few feet of air between your car and that rattling boxcar!)

[eastcoast]

Hey, when you do lay the city down, remember to angle it away
from the viewer. Do not make a city straight , give it some character
and some things to lookat and look for. Be creative because everyone
will really look at the big scenes more than the little ones. Draw
attention to it by adding some PIZZAZZ. I normally use many different
materials to do a scene so it does not come out looking bland.
IF IT IS AVAILABLE, PUT IT TO USE. Try all the products and amaze yourself.

[DSchmitt]

Opinion

On a layout its better to make the streets and roads a little narrow so they don't overpower the scene. I've seen some otherwise nice scenes of actual locations where the streets or roads, while correct to scale, were disconcerting because the divided what should have been a unified scene.

[Anonymous]

I found a great little product by the German company Busch. It comes in several pieces to a box and looks like concrete sidewalk, has curved bits so you can make the corners. I use it on my layout and am very happy with it.

[Jetrock]

QUOTE: Originally posted by eastcoast

Hey, when you do lay the city down, remember to angle it away
from the viewer. Do not make a city straight , give it some character
and some things to lookat and look for.

I'm trying to figure out how to do this because the city I model (Sacramento, CA) really *is* laid out in a perfectly square grid of city blocks, and the belt line around it just went around the edge of this perfectly square grid!

Because the grid pattern (downtown is still called "the grid" by locals) is such a distinctive feature of Sacramento I'd hate to exclude it. I'm trying to make up for its essential griddiness by adding a bunch of character--Sacramento has lots of weird little details like its sunken alleys (much of downtown was raised 10-12 feet in the 1870's to prevent flooding, and a lot of alleys are still at the original street level), a dizzying variety of old brick buildings with terracotta tile roofs, and lots of local details.

Figuring out ways to effectively disguise the streets that run into walls will be a problem (I plan on having at least one bus blocking an intersection, but you can only have so many buses!) but I'm looking for innovative ways to solve this.

[eastcoast]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Jetrock

QUOTE: Originally posted by eastcoast

Hey, when you do lay the city down, remember to angle it away
from the viewer. Do not make a city straight , give it some character
and some things to lookat and look for.

I'm trying to figure out how to do this because the city I model (Sacramento, CA) really *is* laid out in a perfectly square grid of city blocks, and the belt line around it just went around the edge of this perfectly square grid!

Because the grid pattern (downtown is still called "the grid" by locals) is such a distinctive feature of Sacramento I'd hate to exclude it. I'm trying to make up for its essential griddiness by adding a bunch of character--Sacramento has lots of weird little details like its sunken alleys (much of downtown was raised 10-12 feet in the 1870's to prevent flooding, and a lot of alleys are still at the original street level), a dizzying variety of old brick buildings with terracotta tile roofs, and lots of local details.

Figuring out ways to effectively disguise the streets that run into walls will be a problem (I plan on having at least one bus blocking an intersection, but you can only have so many buses!) but I'm looking for innovative ways to solve this.

[:p]
WHAT TO DO IS;
cut the roads at a 45 % angle and put the buildings at an angle as well. This
will also allow you to model the grid and hide some streets if you need.

[DSchmitt]

To Jetrock

To make a street that ends at a wall appear to continue, build a street hidden from normal viewing angles, along the wall and at 90 degrees to the street that you want to extend and place a mirror at a 45 degree angle across the intersection. Use "mirror writing" on signs and place auto facing the "wrong" direction along the hidden street so that they will appear right in the mirror..

A lot of Sacramento streets have large overhanging trees along them wich can also help hide their ends.