I’ve recently begun work on an extension to my layout that will depict some dense urban scenery representing the edge of a major city’s downtown business district. In general appearance it will resemble Art Fahie’s City of Amherst on his Niagara & Pearl Creek (N scale) layout.
My example is in HO scale and will fill a 2’x10’ space on my layout extension. Many of the buildings will be quite large (up to ten stories high and some considerably more than 100’ in width). My current design calls for 25-30 major kitbashed structures, some of which are already well under construction. While one rarely sees such large city scenes modeled, probably because of space considerations, I was wondering if anyone here has done, or is currently building, such a complex, city scene?
I have a similar project under way at the moment, and am busy working along the backscene with ‘flats’.
None of the buildings stick out more than 4" from the backscene, and I intend to model lower buildings towards the front. the whole layout is 14’ x 18" and is HO.
Jon Grant: Splendid photos, great concept, Now if I can decipher your industrial area to a mountainous woodland scene for a logging along a back wall, I will be happy. Now to get my petrified brain transferring the concept to a remote mountain logging operation, this may be a bit of a challenge, thanks
With buildings that are too tall, do you run the riisk that they leave the modeling scene so to speak and intrude into the regular unmodeled airspace. With the newer walk around layouts ( no so wide) I would think that could be a problem. In the older table layout (much wider base) I’ve seen some that did not cause a problem.
Most of my layout (currently being built and planned) is set in a major fictional metopolis in southern Canada.
The current module I’m planning and will begin constrution of this summer will be a commercial and research district in the city’s densest area. I’m planning on scratchbuilding most of the larger hi-rise buildings with balsa (I’ve had some training in building architectural concept models from back when I was a design student) and only kitbashing a few structures.
The major commuter station here (which will be part of the student union of a major urban university) is being designed with the work of Frank Gehry (New Gugenhiem in Spain and the art center at the University of Minn.) Renzo Piano (Kansai international airport, Japan) and Santiago Calitrava (Milwaukee Art Museum and Olympic stadium in Athens) in mind.
Several of the other buildings will be representitive of different periods, to show the layered reality of most cities. The newspaper printing press building will be an art-decco building and the Biochemical labs will be gothic to give some examples.
The main commuter line will be elevated and make a sweeping turn through the module, under it will be two layers of street (much as one can see in certain areas of Downtown Chicago) and on the lowest level will be a local freight switching line loosely based on the trackplan from the Boston harbour layout addition that was featured in MR a few years ago.
Urban scenes lend themselves to shelf-type layouts for the obvious ecomony of using building flats. No major urban areas up here on the mountains but I think there will be a small city scheme on my switching layout when I venture back into HO again.
The Feb, issue of MR has a nice urban layout in a small space.
What timing! Check out the April Model Railroader. There’s an article where a guy has built an urban layout in a spare bedroom. Fantastic pics! He’s also got a sidebar where he lists what the structures were kitbashed from.
CNJ831, with all the new buildings available you will have fun with this. I am building pieces of Philadelphia, Willow Street and American Street, Delaware Avenue etc.
In your planning work try to avoid switching puzzles as you will grow tired of them. Most industries did not share a track with another one unless multiple switches were used. This is because cars need time to be unloaded and would not be moved while unloading. I know there are examples but typically RR’s dedicated a siding to an industry. You will also be happy with this.
Most roads separated the main from industry running tracks so the turnouts, and local jobs, were not cloging up the main. An industry running track paralled the main and contained the turnouts. They would be on both sides of the main.
The height of the buildings is important. Jon Grant’s are running 3 to 6 stories and this is typical of big city factory buildings built arround the turn of the century. Great work Jon, by the way. Buildings had frieght elevators in them and lots of windows to let sunlight in. Factory buildings over 7 to 8 will begin to dwarf things a bit and should be the exception not the rule.
Use brick with brick pilasters and brick with concrete pilasters (brick curtain). Most buildings built arround the turn of the century had water towers on them. Many still do or they just have the frame and floor still standing. All the Walther’s kits come with one and this is a nice touch. Don’t forget the elevator towers poking through the roof or built on the end of a building.
Switch leads need to be long enough to include a switcher or GEEP with at least two 50 foot cars. This will add enjoyment to your operation. When industries have sidings at right angle to the industry running track consider 18 inch rad.or even 15 but typically the locomotive, unless equipped with swivel couplers, would have several cars to use as a handle rather than negotiate such trackage. Reading Company close coupled steam engi
If you haven’t already grab the franklin and south manchester book it’s the bible for the kind of scenery you are contemplating. I’m also doing an urban heavy layout though I’m going with mostly 4-5 story buildings and a couple of warehouse type districts for switching. Most of the layout will have operable trolley lines intermixed with the frieght.So like you DPM and Walthers and all sorts of plastruct will be my friends. Good luck Rob
I limited the height of all my buildings to 6 storeys because I was limited by the 15" backscene height. the layout is modular and portable, so I have to plan it so 2 boards fasten together face-to-face to make a box structure.
Here’s a couple more pics done since the last ones, very much a work still in progress.
Jon, I just had a look at the rail images gallery and I am really impressed. The Atlas tower is amazing. Also, I really like the aged beick effect you get with the DPM kits in other models you have made. I have 3 questions…
What technique do you use for the brickwork? It looks like you might paint the mortar first and then drybru***he brick surfaces?
I really like the dirty broken windows, how do you do those?
The faded wall paintings/posters, are these decals heavily weathered?
I painted the basic brick colour all over the surface of the model. I then gave the lot a thin wash of black acrylic. once dry, I painted on a watery mix of chalk weathering powder - ie get some chalk of a suitable colour, break it up into small particles and add water.
I then painted the mix over the brickwork and let it dry to a powdery mess. It is then an easy task to rub over the brick surface with your thumb or a stiff bru***o just leave the chalk in the cracks, giving you a mortar effect. If you are too heavy handed, just repeat as necessary.
In the pic below, there is a row of bricks just inder the second story windows that has had the chalk wa***reatment, but not rubbed off yet.
The dirty windows are done with the black acrycil wash painted onto the window, either before the glazing is fitted or after - each gives different effects. Broken windows are done by painting the pane with a more solid colour and weathering to suit.
The decals are from a rub-on sheet and weathered with a fibreglass pen
DPM modulars are tops for urban scenery. Pick up a copy of Art Curren’s book on kitbashing structure kits. I think Amazon has it. Great for creating some neat industrial structures.
Jon, thanks for the extra information. It is great to see a fellow Brit on the site with such great modelling skills. This has inspired me to try and get some of the industrial scenery started on my layout.
Another advantage of shelf layouts in modeling urban scenery is that you can use the “shadow-box” effect–by showing only the base of a tall building, whose top rises above the upper edge of the “shadow-box”, you create the impression of a much larger building.
For the mountains, this sort of approach works too–a fellow wanted to accurately model giant redwoods in O scale, and a shelf layout with upper valence to block the top of the “sky” was suggested to allow him to suggest giant tree trunks without having to model the whole tree (a full-sized redwood would be around 6’ tall in O scale!)
Art Curren was the “kitbashing guru.” His articles were fantastic and after reading them I would always say “wow, I can do that!” I’m glad to see MRR is having a kitbashing contest named for him.
What you are planning sound to be a lot of fun. I have an area on the “as yet to be built layout” of around 3 1/2 by 11 1/2 feet which I am going to try doing this in which will be mainly my urban “warehouse district”.
BTW, others think it’s fun, too. They have an email group at Yahoo called the urban modelers SIG at:
Jon Grant - I’m curious how you went about painting the brickwork on that faded/dirty white factory, illustrated in your first response to this thread. Did you simply apply washes of thinned ink stain or very diluted black paint to the solid white walls? Looks nice and I’d like to try it. I did something similar to an all white brick building in the past but had the reddish brickwork show, as if the paint had worn away or peeled off.
