Hello, newbie here - so excuse me if this has been answered (I didn’t see it anywhere).
Anyway - I was wondering the best way for determining the height of very tall real world objects, such as signage? I know they are typically a LOT larger than they appear.
Example - I recently took some photos of a cool old fast food sign that I wanted to replicate. I didn’t have a tape measure on me - so I put my hand up to the highest point I could and made a note of that spot I was able to reach to. When I got home - I opened my photo and drew a box over it at the scale height that I reached to - then simply duplicated the box over and over until I reached the top of the sign. From that, I determined that it was about 36 feet tall I think it’s approximately correct.
Anyway - is there a better method? And what if I can’t get close enough to actually touch the sign?
Nope you pretty much do what a lot of us have done before. Use something in the photograph as a point of reference for example a cement block, or maybe something like a street sigh so when you do have your tape measure you can check the height of similar sign and then calculate what your shooting for. If you see some nutball like yours truely in your neighborhood with a tape measure checking the distance between two telephone poles and their diameter you can bet he’s a model railroader.
I have gotten a little more sophisticated now I have one of those laser measuring thigns you buy ion Lowes so I’m a high tech geek.
You could calculate the height using triangulation. You measure the distance from the bottom of the sign to two points where you stand and measure the angle from the ground to the top of the sign. Because the sign is a right angle (90 degrees), you can calculate the distance from the ground to the top of the sign using a formula: (Yah I know it’s a boat not a sign, but same principle )
Keep in mind that for the most part our scale structures tend to be on the small side, our trees tend to be on the short side, phone and power poles are often shorter than the prototype, and our “city blocks” are nowhere near a city block in size – which suggests that even if you found the exact height of a commercial fast food sign, you may want to think twice about making your model that height, because it might dominate your scale horizon in an odd way. Choosing a height that just looks right might be the better way to go.
It may not tell you the height of any particular sign, but many city or village codes (often available on the internet) list a maximum height for commercial signs. I found this for Indianapolis - Marion County on the internet, organized by zoning:
It is a good bet that many signs approach the maximum allowed for that zoning. Which raises an interesting question, how many of us have given any thought to what zoning applies to the various parts of our layouts? I have not but I guess I should because things like width of sidewalks, fence setbacks, and other features all depend on zoning in many areas.
Some rather tony suburbs prohibit tall signs so even things like gas stations mount full size signs close to the ground in “classy” (?) brick mountings. On the other hand, commercial structures near freeways often have extremely tall signs that can be seen from far distances so drivers know to turn off at the next exit.
You could also check your local building code and find out if there’s a limit to how high they can be… Most towns have that kind of information on their websites
For stuff like that, I usually just “eyeball” it. The only time I get into sweating scale dimensions are when the item affects track clearances, such as a highway overpass or a loading dock. And even there you don’t need hard dimensions, you just need a large freight car!
If you can’t touch it, you need some known measurement of the structure or something immediately adjacent to it, preferably in the sme orientation you are measuring. You can count bricks, cement blocks, the height of a car hood, diameter of a railcar wheel, gauge or track, estimate the height of a person, a door way, etc. Wheelbases of autos can be handy because in many cases you can find them in the statistics of the car model.
Once you get a know dimension, if the object is smaller, you can enlarge or reduce the known length to some scale length and then you have a scale photo. For example I had a slide of the end of a pasenger car, I knew gauge so I projected the slide on a piece of paper and zoomed it until the gauge on the photo matched gauge for O scale adn then traced O scale plans for the car end.
If the object is bigger you can calculate the scale (actually a conversion factor). Measure the known object on the photo. So if the known object is .891" long and its actual dimension is 6 ft 4 in or 76 in (or 6.333 ft), Divide the two numbers to get a conversion factor in either inches or feet.
For inches 76/.891 = 85.3
For feet 6.33/.891= 7.1
Then you simply measure a dimension on the picture and multiply by the conversion factor, really simple. So one wall on the building photo is 1.328 in high. 1.328 x 85.3 = 113.3 inches high or 1.328 x 7.1 = 9.43 ft high.
If you do the measurement in inches, you can convert it directly to scale dimensions in the same step. The inches conversion factor was 85.3. Divide that by the scale to get the direct conversion factor. So for HO scale, that would be 85.3/87.1 = ,979.
Carmel-by-the-Sea (CA) has probably taken it to the extreme. I had difficulty finding our small hotel (I’d left the address behind), so stopped at the City Hall to ask for directions after driving around the small downtown district. The answer?: across the street. I had passed the location three times previously without spotting it! Also, the number of restaurants will appear to quadruple once one gets out of the car and walks around.
Putting a person into a photograph or as you did, marking a point from your body that you could measure later is a good quick way of doing it. Another way is to use a measuring stick. Even if the sign is beyond the reach of your measuring stick, you can put it into the photograph and take your measurements off it. I got the idea from an old issue of MR. The author made a measuring stick from a bunch of sticks like 1 by 1s and made it foldable with either hinges or bolts. It was marked off in one foot increments. It worked like a carpenter’s folding wooden ruler. I made one from the handle of my roof rake. Now, for those of you lucky to live in a climate where you don’t have to shovel snow in the winter, a roof rake has a wide scraper with a 15 foot handle. It is used to pull snow off the roof of a house to prevent damage from the weight of excessive snow. The handle comes apart into 3 sections each 5 feet long. Using black tape, I marked off the handle into one foot segments alternating aluminum and black, with one segment in each section marked off in inches. I know, very few of you will have a roof rake but it shouldn’t be too difficult to make one out of lightweight pipe or wood that can be easily joined together and taken apart. I’ve enclosed a picture, taken a few years ago, of my eldest granddaughter helping me measure the school in the small town where she lives with the hopes that some day I can scratchbuild that school for my layout.
I think it’s approximately correct.
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