I'm working on a layout for a city and can't find the scale sizes for the sidewalks or city streets with parking. Do you know what size they should be, or where I could find this info?
All depends on the town in question.
Downtown Deco, Walthers and other make some pre-fab sidewalks.
Craig
DMW
tc2blue wrote: I'm working on a layout for a city and can't find the scale sizes for the sidewalks or city streets with parking. Do you know what size they should be, or where I could find this info?
Just an idea, but maybe try measuring a sidewalk in whichever city/town is closest to you and divide the measurement by 87.
-Morgan
A typical downtown city street is 60' wide, the sidewalks generally 12'. However, this eats up a great deal of layout space if more than one street is modeled, so it would be best to halve these numbers in most instances, it's not all that noticeable. This is what I did on the urban section of my pike, seen below.
CNJ831
One word of caution. When you figure out how wide to make your sidewalks take into consideration what else will be on the sidewalk - streetlights? fire hydrants? parking meters? newspaper machines? mail collection boxes? trash cans? All of these take up space. Most street lights have bases that are too wide. Add in a few of those other items and pretty soon you sidewalk becomes only 1 person wide or where 2 people walking side by side and 1 person has to constantly dodge objects. There is a middle ground but your best taking a few of those items and doing some testing as to what looks good to the eye.
Same thing with the street. Get some cars and a lay it out on a piece of paper. One lane, two lanes of travel in each direction? On street parking - parallel or diagonal? Lay it out on paper and get an idea of what looks good and how much room it takes.
A typical traffic lane is 12 feet wide, a parallel parking lane is 8-9 feet wide, city sidewalk widths vary by area and traffic but 10-12 feet is a good figure.
The width of a traffic lane can be reduced to 10 feet wide and a parking lane can be defined as 8 feet wide (even if you're modeling the era of the biggest American cars). So a city street with two traffic lanes and parallel parking on both sides would be a scale 40 feet or about 5.5 inches. For a main street with two lanes of traffic in either direction, the width grows to about 8.25 inches. Sidewalks can be compressed to 9 feet (1.25 inches), so adding things up, a two-lane street with parking and sidewalks would be about 8 inches wide and a main street would be roughly 10.75 inches wide.
Diagonal parking is going to require about 18 scale feet or about 2.5 inches per side, based on common practices, so parallel parking is probably better if space is an issue. You also need fewer vehicles to fill the spaces.
Going much smaller than 10 feet wide for a lane is going to make things look a bit too compressed, especially if you have trucks in your traffic. While passenger cars and light trucks (pickups, vans, etc.) are generally under 7 feet wide, modern trucks are generally 8.5 feet wide and even older trucks were 8 feet wide. Add mirrors and you really need at least 10 feet.
Of course, this assumes you are using scale vehicles. If you are using Hot Wheels, Matchbox or similar vehicles, they are too wide to fit these dimensions and you will need to scale everything up accordingly.
A further couple of considerations regarding the question at hand, in light of the fact that I've actual built a major urban scene and had to address the problem of street width myself.
First of all, unless you have a layout area of abnormally great depth available for your city scene, it will be impossible to model it anywhere near to HO scale accurately. At least three (and better, four) layers of structures are needed to produce anything like a realistic impression of the congestion of buildings in a major city. However, few modelers devote more than 18"-24" of layout depth to their cities, which is extremely limiting with regards to modeling them in HO. So other than those nearest the viewer, streets must be dramatically compressed in width just to fit inbetween the needed number of layers of structures. Therefore, they need only be inferred, not actually modeled. Keep in mind, too, that those streets beyond the first row of structures are not likely to be visible to the observer because buildings block his view. Nothing looks worse and more toy-like, as far as I am concerned, than a scene supposedly representating a major urban setting that is only one street deep.
Likewise, always remember that you are modeling a railroad, not modeling urban planning. What you aim to do is give the viewer an impression of a city before them, rather than anything near an accurate, full scale, rendering of same.
And finally, real back streets, those normally nearest the railroad tracks, are typical old and often very narrow (one lane plus parking on one side) in most urban center situations. You will not normally find broard, downtown avenues in the usually industrial or old tenament sections of town near the RR's right-of-way, at least not in the eastern U.S.
If you want some ideas of the proper overall way to handle this sort of modeling, I suggest taking a look at Art Fahie's outstanding City of Amherst, from his N-scale N&PC layout, at the Bar Mills website (or, for earlier era layouts, George Sellios' FSM).
(a small portion of the City of Jacksboro on my Hudson Highlands RR layout)
Width of streets can vary greatly from city to city. The secondary downtown streets in Cincinnati seem vary narrow to me as compared to downtown Columbus where I worked for over 20 years. It depends on just how many traffic and parking lanes you want. For the town I am just finishing now, I wanted to have one traffic lane in each direction and parking on both sides but my available space would have made each lane unrealistically narrow so I decided to go with parking on only one side of the street. This was a good compromise. Sidewalk widths can vary also but in my case, it was dictated by the sidewalk width of the Merchant's Row I and II kits which seem a bit narrow for downtown streets. The rest of the structures came without sidewalks so I made those the same width so all the building fronts would line up.
At 18-24 inches to depict a city, you're not going to have much room for many layers of buildings. Besides, streets are cheaper than structures. However, I will certainly agree that any streets beyond the foreground can be indicated rather than actually modeled in most cases.
In my town square area, the streets are a scale 34 feet wide which includes parallel parking on each side. The sidewalks are scale 8-feet wide with a curb and gutter. For a small town, this looks reasonable. Here are a few examples from my website...
The streets, BTW, are made from foam core board brushed with drywall mud. The sidewalks/curbs/gutters are made from sheet styrene. I am pleased with the results. Hope this helps!
Cliff Powers
www.magnoliaroute.com
maandg- Love the awnings and signs!
Something else to remember is the kits we build (DPM, Merchants Row, etc..) Depict more of a rural business district than a major city like Columbus or Cincinnati. So the roads and sidewalks wouldn't be as wide.
Cliff's street's look great, but they bring up another point. The difference between a 34-foot-wide street and a 40-foot-wide street is less than an inch: 4.69 inches vs. 5.52 inches. So what sounds like a big deal isn't that big a deal after all.
Just for fun, I took four Athearn 1955 Ford Panel Delivery trucks and put them side-by-side with their rearview mirrors touching. From the outside edge of rightmost rearview mirror to the leftmost rearview mirror, the distance was 3.97 inches measured with a digital caliper. Then I substituted 2 Athearn Ford C trucks (the Ford C was introduced in the fall of 1956, so I figure it's fair game). This time, the distance was 4.41 inches, a scale 31.97 feet. I also measured a CMW IH R-190 Flatbed, which turned out to be almost 105 inches wide and a CMW IH R-190 refrigerated truck, which was just over 104 inches wide (both sizes are not only unprototypical, they're illegal, even by modern standards). Each of those trucks is almost 9 feet wide. The cabs, by the way, are actually about six inches too narrow.
So, to me, a street with mixed traffic is going to look best at 5.5 inches curb-to-curb. If you're going to have mostly passenger cars and light trucks, with an occasional medium truck, like the Athearn Ford C, Mack B or the CMW IH R-190 or White WC-22, then it's probably okay to go with five inches, which works out to 36.25 feet. Give yourself two 8-foot-wide parking lanes and split the rest between the two traffic lanes. Leave off most of the markings except the center stripe and that five-inch road will look even more spacious. Check what Cliff did with his streets; the parallel parking markings don't have the bar that indicates the width so the eye only sees the center stripe as defining a width. A very nice touch! (Besides, the "L" or "T" bar at the end of the parking space stripe was mostly to allow the cops or meter maids to see if you were parked too far from the curb.)
Incidentally, parallel parking spaces are generally 18 to 22 feet long. If you're modeling the 1950s or earlier, 20 is probably a good length to allow some maneuvering. Don't be tempted to drop too make them too small. While Athearn's 1931 Ford Model A is just 13.15 feet long, Ricko's 1931 Lincoln Model K is 18.29 feet long and you can bet the wealthy owner of the Lincoln is going to have the ear of the mayor, if not the street commissioner. The Model Power/Malibu 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Air measures out to be 16.49 feet long and it's within 2 scale inches of exact HO scale (too bad it's gone) but the Cadillac Eldorado is over 17 feet, six inches long (the Malibu Eldorado is within a scale inch of the right width, but it's about ten scale inches too short).
Side streets with one-way traffic and parallel parking are often just 27 feet wide, about 3.75 inches, and alleys are even narrower as they are often just wide enough for a refuse truck and trash containers.
Incidentally, these measurements should work well for any modeling era.
Bill C.
Tim Fahey
Musconetcong Branch of the Lehigh Valley RR
bcawthon wrote: Cliff's street's look great, but they bring up another point. The difference between a 34-foot-wide street and a 40-foot-wide street is less than an inch: 4.69 inches vs. 5.52 inches. So what sounds like a big deal isn't that big a deal after all.
.83 inches doesn't sound like much but on a model railroad, that is a significant amount of real estate. Most of us begin with a fixed amount of benchwork, plan our track, then try to shoe horn as much of the non-railroading world as we can in what space is left. Often we don't have a lot of flexibility, especially those of use who are kit builders instead of scratchbuilders or kitbashers. Our structures need a fixed amount of space so often the width of our roads are dictated by what is left. As with so many decisions we make in this hobby, we are forced to make compromises. In the town I am finishing now, the 3 7/8 inches I had left for the main street was not wide enough for traffic lanes and parking lanes in both directions so to make it plausible, one side of the street was made a No Parking zone so I only needed one parking lane, not two. This is not an unrealistic decision as this is not uncommon in the real world. We all have a vision of what we would like our layouts to look like but that often runs up against what we have space for. A number of times I have reworked my original plan to gain as little as an extra 1/8 of an inch. .83 inches is huge.
Space problems hit even those of us who do kitbash and scratchbuild, which I guess is one of the reasons why we kitbash and scratchbuild.
There's nothing wrong with one-way traffic, parking on only one side of the street, or even no on-street parking at all. You can find examples of these all over the country. Your 3 7/8 inches is perfect for that kind of street. The street I live on is 27 feet wide (yes, I measured it), a common width in modern residential neighborhoods as it cuts down on speeding. But I have seen (and driven on) similar streets in large cities, especially the older areas that were laid out in the years before the automobile. A 27-foot-wide street works out to 3.72 inches in HO scale.
However, the original question dealt with widths for streets, parking lanes and sidewalks. Since I happen to like vehicles and had done the research previously, I elected to post common prototype measurements and some of the variations that can be found. I even measured some HO-scale vehicles to see how much space is required. The difference between Cliff's 34-foot wide street and a 36-foot wide street is .28 inches and a five-inch street width works out to just over 36 feet wide, which is easy to remember and will provide adequate space for two-way traffic of any type, including tractor-trailer rigs and buses, and parking lanes on both sides. If you start with the idea a traffic lane is 10-12 feet wide and a parallel parking lane is eight feet wide, then you can adjust your street width to the space available simply by adding or subtracting lanes and still have a realistic-looking scene.
I'm model HO traction. The track centers are 2" apart. Add an additional 1" on each side for clearance From the track center line. Then an another 1" for parking and 1" for sidewalks. That's 8" total. My modules are 4' long and vary from 20" to 30" wide. This works great for me.
Www. Facebook.com/codorusvalley
For most of us, the motion is on the rails, not the streets, street running, traction and Faller cars notwithstanding. So, I consider roadways part of the scenery that's subject to selective compression. The cars are static models, as are the pedestrians. So, they get squished a bit in favor of more real estate for railroads.
One effect this has is intensifying the "urban canyon" look even with our typical 2 and 3 story models.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Don't forget that forced perspective can help save space and enhance the look of your roads. Roads that travel between the layout aisle and backdrop can taper down in width as they approach the backdrop. Let's assume 10' or 11' wide travel lanes adjacent to the aisle tapering down to 8' wide lanes at the backdrop. Likewise, 8' parking lanes at the aisle can taper down to as narrow as 6' at the backdrop. Place larger vehicles nearer the aisle and smaller vehicles toward the backdrop for even more perspective.
Hornblower