I didn't want to hijack the other street thread so I thought I should start a different one for this topic.
What are your tricks for putting lines on urban streets and how far do you go? Simple white dashes or full blown double yellow lines and marked off intersection markings?
Rick
You are going to get different responses depending upon the era, location, big city versus town or village, etc.
On my layout, I model dowtown Chicago in the mid-50s. I use 1/8" automobile pin striping on 0.010" styrene sheet. My main streets are 6" wide and my secondary streets are 4" wide.
Here is a sample of my urban streets.
Rich
Alton Junction
For
In real life looking down a street white lines are not seen in a near distance. White lines over a wall etc. are not seen. Therefore I do not have them on my layout unless I am to take any photographs of the area. Those lines that are painted on the layout are just a representation.
IMG_5547 by David Harrison, on Flickr
David
To the world you are someone. To someone you are the world
I cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought
Thanks. Did you do anything to seal the pinstriping? Any reason you used white for the center line instead of yellow?
BTW - I have those same Bachmann buildings, although I didn't double up the Variety Store.
I did not seal the pinstriping, and I have not had any problem with them curling up.
As far as the color of the striping is concerned, I tried my best to research white versus yellow in 1950s Chicago. What I found was that both the solid and the dashed stripes were white during that era. Sometime in the 1970s, there was a changeover to yellow.
My friend and I are struggling with this on our layouts. Use paints and it tends to bleed. Use tape and it looks a little too clean. Considering experimenting with white decal paper but its difficult to find.
Love your layout Rich. Looks like printers row and Dearborn station
richhotrain As far as the color of the striping is concerned, I tried my best to research white versus yellow in 1950s Chicago. What I found was that both the solid and the dashed stripes were white during that era. Sometime in the 1970s, there was a changeover to yellow. Rich
That makes perfect sense. Thanks.
Use correction tape.
My layout is modern, so I try to use the latest AASHTO, MUTCD, and ADA standards for pavement marking. But . . . this is an N Scale layout, so a certain amount of fudging takes palce.
Robert
LINK to SNSR Blog
My layout is N scale, and it seemed no matter what I tried, the stripes were too bright or too wide or ....
I finally found some dry transfer sheets of various colored lines. While not perfect, they were just about the right width, and with the dry transfers, they came out looking a little 'rough', much like lines on roads sometimes look.
York1 John
On previous layouts I've used a colored pencil to mark my lines and was satisfied with the effect. My current layout isn't to the point of marking lines so I don't have any photos to share. Sorry.
Mike
It's the white line era for me. I went out and got a white gel pen, and I use that along with a straight edge and sometimes a Frence curve. Most of my streets are narrow and have no lines, but a few have lines.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Love that sewer in the street Mr. B. Don't see that modeled much.
NorthsideChi Love your layout Rich. Looks like printers row and Dearborn station
The four tall buildings facing Dearborn Station are my attempt to closely resemble the four buildings that you see so often in photos of Dearborn Station.
The four buildings facing the camera are an attempt to create a few downtown Chicago buildings that you might see around the Chicago Loop such as the Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, a department store on State Street such as Sears or Marshall Field, etc. I took a lot of liberties with the prototype for this purpose.
I envy your skills in this regard. You could undoubtedly and faithfully replicate such areas as Printers Row. Maybe I should hire you.
I have made a few noble attempts to capture the look of Dearborn Station including the track work, all of the large freight houses, and some of the surrounding buildings. But to do it right, you either have to scratchbuild or master 3D printing techniques.
Rich - did you do any "weathering" on the pinstripes?
hbgatsf Rich - did you do any "weathering" on the pinstripes?
On my main road out of town I used the "reverse mask" method and painted the pavement an off-white then used very narrow masking tape sliced with a razor. Today there are more choices for narrow tape (finger nail art).
Once the white was dry I masked the stripes then applied a very dark gray primer color that simulates old asphalt.
HO_Texaco1 by Edmund, on Flickr
After peeling up the mask things looked pretty good.
Regards, Ed
hbgatsf Thanks. Did you do anything to seal the pinstriping? Any reason you used white for the center line instead of yellow? BTW - I have those same Bachmann buildings, although I didn't double up the Variety Store.
In the 60's, 50's and earlier, both white and yellow were used for center lines.
I remember single white center lines on rural secondary roads here in Maryland, PA, VA and WV well into the 60's.
Sheldon
October, 1940 Caribou, Maine. Double yellow and white stripe between:
BAR_Caribou-ME- by Edmund, on Flickr
September 1939. Black stripe on new concrete?
Copper mining and sulfuric acid plant, Copperhill], Tenn. (LOC) by The Library of Congress, on Flickr
Romney, West Virginia, 1942, Single white stripe:
Road out of Romney, West Va. (LOC) by The Library of Congress, on Flickr
July, 1942, Detroit. Nice, new striping but only near the intersections:
Looking south from the Maccabees Building with the Detroit skyline in the distance, Detroit, Mich. (LOC) by The Library of Congress, on Flickr
Just for reference.
gmpullman October, 1940 Caribou, Maine. Double yellow and white stripe between: BAR_Caribou-ME- by Edmund, on Flickr September 1939. Black stripe on new concrete? Copper mining and sulfuric acid plant, Copperhill], Tenn. (LOC) by The Library of Congress, on Flickr
I wonder what was in all those barrels in Caribou, Me.
The sulfide fumes killed a lot of vegatation in the Tennessee copper mining district. Sulfide fumes also turn lead paint black, I wonder if that is why the black road stripe.
ROBERT PETRICK My layout is modern, so I try to use the latest AASHTO, MUTCD, and ADA standards for pavement marking. But . . . this is an N Scale layout, so a certain amount of fudging takes palce. Robert
Robert, that is interesting. Even where we have bike lanes around here, I have never seen the double white line for the shoulder/bike lane.
We still have more roads without shoulder lines than those with them. But then again, we still have a lot of roads without shoulders, just 20' -26' of paving and then the dirt, peoples yards, utility poles 18" off the pavement, forests, etc.
And many such roads have very high traffic levels. If I filmed some of my trips from where we live, going thru the country side to get into the Baltimore metro area the "back way", you would never know you were just a few miles from a large city.
I will try to post sme pictures.
Double lined bike lanes are either buffered or mandatory stay-in-lane for cyclists where car traffic cannot pass safely...in this case a turn lane
https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSZfwg6yBpzJGMRg9?g_st=ic
There's dashed lines where the capacity of cyclists are so high, that it's expected they will overflow into vehicles lanes
https://maps.app.goo.gl/tkJVdM69sLk37q5M9?g_st=ic
MidlandMikeI wonder what was in all those barrels in Caribou, Me.
'taters.
Delano, Jack,, photographer.
Cheers, Ed
Good morning
Nice looking roads and lines gentlemen
I will have a country highway that will be coming into my layout. Ain't even close to getting there yet. Similar roads with hills and hairpins would normally be double yellow lines on my layout as well.
Out driving around, I've estimated them to have maybe 4" separation and maybe 5" thick. Never went to the middle of the street to measure them though. Too Dangerous! ...
A 1/16" in N scale is 10". I have no idea how one would go about creating these tinsel-tail yellow hairlines to look good on an N scale road. There's no 1/32" pinstripping available that I know of?
If I could find that thin of a pinstriping, I might try a negative approach and airbrush the center of the road a pale yellow...then lay the pinstripes down the center over the yellow... then paint a dull grimy smoke over the road with the pinstripes still intact... then remove the pinstripes and take a black micro point marker and draw a bunch of lines and cracks...then airbrush a dull coat over the whole road to level the surface out like they do for auto body.
A lot of threads I don't put my two cents in when I only have a nickel of knowledge on the subject. Doesn't mean I ain't reading the threads here. Just means I'm paying attention to the guys that have 5, 10 and 20 bucks of knowledge on the subject to share. So I know what I'm doing once I get there.
Thanks
TF
NorthsideChi Double lined bike lanes are either buffered or mandatory stay-in-lane for cyclists where car traffic cannot pass safely...in this case a turn lane https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSZfwg6yBpzJGMRg9?g_st=ic There's dashed lines where the capacity of cyclists are so high, that it's expected they will overflow into vehicles lanes https://maps.app.goo.gl/tkJVdM69sLk37q5M9?g_st=ic
Well, ok, but again, that's not how they are doing it here in Maryland, or anywhere that I have seen in the Mid Atlantic.
Even with more developed guidelines or mandated federal laws, there are variations from state to state and region to region.
On the modeling side, I have no interest in current practice, it is always September 1954 here.
But I commented on Roberts picture because I had NEVER seen that anywhere. Admittedly I avoid cities these days except when necessary for my work, and any bike lane is a rare thing out here in the rural suburbs - but we have a few here and there in our small towns.
I was looking for info on how big to make lines and found this PDF. Hope someone else can find it useful.
https://www.dot.ny.gov/main/business-center/engineering/cadd-info/drawings/standard-sheets-us-repository/685-01_050213e1_0.pdf
ROBERT PETRICK My layout is modern, so I try to use the latest AASHTO, MUTCD, and ADA standards for pavement marking. But . . . this is an N Scale layout, so a certain amount of fudging takes palce.
Interesting picture. Did you paint the streets and parking areas on a big sheet of styrene and then put the building foundations and sidewalks over top of them?
ATLANTIC CENTRAL Even with more developed guidelines or mandated federal laws, there are variations from state to state and region to region. But I commented on Roberts picture because I had NEVER seen that anywhere. Admittedly I avoid cities these days except when necessary for my work, and any bike lane is arare thing out here in the rural suburbs - but we have a few here and there in our small towns. Sheldon
But I commented on Roberts picture because I had NEVER seen that anywhere. Admittedly I avoid cities these days except when necessary for my work, and any bike lane is arare thing out here in the rural suburbs - but we have a few here and there in our small towns.
Hey Guys -
Here's the overall scene: rugged rocky mountains of Wyoming on the right bank, sandy beaches of Florida on the left; San Juan River inlet in between with high-level long-span bridge to accomodate ocean-going ships. Riverside Drive on the Florida side. Small craft dock for kayakers and yuppie para-sailors.
Please ignore the fact that there are no beaches in Florida with a 90-foot escarpment. Also ignore the fact that my bridge has barely 100 scale feet of vertical clearance and 400 scale feet of horizontal clearance, neither of which is sufficient to allow passage of deep-draft cargo ships. But once you get past the Wyoming-Florida thing, everything else pretty much falls into place.
I'm not sure, exactly, what I was thinking when I put in the double white stripes. I think I thought that I liked the idea of adding bike lanes because I've never seen them on model railroad layouts (and I wanted to accomodate the 1:160 granola-and-Birkenstock crowd). A single white stripe denotes the edge of roadway, and if there was only one stripe through that area the vehicle drivers might think that that wide strip of asphalt was put there for their parking convenience for access to the beach. The sad fact is that most vehicle drivers ignore the two-wheelers, some vehemently so. But mainly I just thought bike lanes looked kinda cool. It's no secret that I take a pretty expansive view of the freelance part of freelance prototypical.
At any rate there are far more errors and omissions in the pavement markings in the little downtown area of my layout.
MisterBeasley It's the white line era for me. I went out and got a white gel pen, and I use that along with a straight edge and sometimes a Frence curve. Most of my streets are narrow and have no lines, but a few have lines.
I was going to respond but your method is exactly the same as mine including the use of French curves for roads that aren't straight. I don't fret at all about the widths of the lines. I just do what looks about right which is good enough for me. Here are a few examples:
hbgatsf My layout is modern, so I try to use the latest AASHTO, MUTCD, and ADA standards for pavement marking. But . . . this is an N Scale layout, so a certain amount of fudging takes palce.