Subject says it all… How do you make your towns?[?] -----NScaler5
I have been in the process of this for some time. My biggest issue has been the location of streets relative to my track. So far I have drawn out the street plans using a sharpie right onto the baseboards. I have several buildings already made that will form the town, but have some space to fill so will be looking for suitable structures now that I know the space I am working with. I think that the key to a successful town is in the details. So I will be putting a lot of effort into getting good looking streets and sidewalks with plenty of little scenes of interest going on. Also, I feel that attention needs to be taken with store fronts and interiors that will be seen. This also means making sure that lighting is planned out. So in a nut shell. Plan!!
Awesome Simon! I really don’t have a plan yet cuz’ I’m just getting started on my town.
----NScaler5
It’s kind of an open-ended question…my layout is all “town” since it is all located in the same city, although the yard is kind of “on the edge of town.”
A depot…needs a freight house and a passenger platform…
Passengers need a diner, Laundry and hotel services…
People need housing, barber shop, general store and a saloon…
Livery for the horses, cold storage for the food, blackshmith and other needs…
Perhaps a post office now that people need to communicate and a telegraph office too.
little by little a town goes up. If there is enough business and commerce it becomes a city.
I like to stack my towns starting with the depot and what sort of industry is nearby. No use having a opera house and fine dining near a Coal Mining town unless you had some really appreciative miners. =)
Of course you need a church, police, jail and a court house too.
It never ends so… choose what you like best and place it on your line.
Depends. If I only need the railroad industries, then thats’ all I’ll do with maybe a gas station or an eatery nearby (the HO scale folks need to eat too). I usually have at least one are that has more town on it to set the period, have a need for passengers etc. Similar to simon1966, I draw in what buildings I must have, and lay the streets out accordingly. I like to have at least one grade crossing and one overpass to help break up the scene and make the town look larger. Don’t forget some things to make it look like a real town, even though it will eat up some space.
Roads with parking, either parallel or diagonal
Sidewalks, you can mount your downtown building on sheet styrene and then you can scribe the sidewalks. Also gives you a curb for the roads.
Signs, lots of signs
Best thing to do is find a town you want to model, go look at it or look for pictures. Concentrate on the parts that are wihin the distance of the railroad that you can model.
Rick
I do like Counterweight, look at the needs in a city or town, but since I’m limited on space by mountains, I try to combine as much as possible. The livery, blacksmith, drover, and stage office all occupy one building, with a barn and corrals out back. The general store also sells clothes, tack, and mining equipment. The saloon is a resteraunt, a billiards parlor, a poker house, and, not to put too fine a point on it, is a two story structure.
I have three buildings left over from a 35 year old layout, and used them for a general idea of size and scale. I went around the house and gathered up all the similar sized boxes I could find. Cold medicine boxes, miniature sewing kits and fishing tackle boxes, small first aid kits, they are all sitting on my layout, getting moved around into different combinations to maximize space and to satisfy the requirements of the valley the town sits in. I’m using small pringles cans for my steam equipment water towers.
The river crossing can really only happen at one spot, a freight depot probably needs to be near the train tracks, the road up the mountain will be cut where the terrain permits it to be, etc, which pins down certain aspects of the town. The rest can float, and the longer I avoid committing myself, the longer the boxes move around, the better the town gets.
That’s the way a real town grows too, except by trial and error. If a resteraunt gets built in the wrong place, it dies, goes into foreclosure, and something else takes its place, until the rightr business ends up in the right place for it to work.
In Joe Fugate’s thread on scenery, he talks about texture, how an area looks from a ways off in addition to up close, and I think this concept applies to more than just scenery. A city or town should have a texture, an attitude, no two are alike and every element adds to the overall texture of the city. I’d rather keep an overall style and mood than add that one extra building that the prototype says HAS to be there,
I like to build the buildings first then fit them in to city plan…DPM has alot of great buildings that you can use that look good together…In one block where I don’t have any buildings yet I have put some ground down and put a lot for sale sign on it…Cox 47
Mine is still in the planning stages but it looks like only one main road, like an interstate, will pass therough.
I’m going to scratchbuild most of mine from wood, cardboard and card stock.
there is a Kalmbach publication called " Buildiing model railroad city scenery" that has a lot of good tips in it…the book goes into backdrops, flats, half buildings, city street and road placements, and full buildings to create the scene…I like to kit bash and many of my buildings are done in such a fashion…a couple of different kits re-arranged into one building is more fun to build and challenging than just throwing together a standard kit building and throwing it on the layout…one building i’ve found that’s pretty universal to use for kit bashing is Model Power’s Mt. Vernon Manufacturing Co…it’s a cheap kit so buying three or four of them won’t break your bank account and is great to use for different kitbashing projects…chuck
Several words pop to mind when I build towns, foreshorten, DPM, compress, forced perspective, false front, jedi mind trick. No need to model what you won’t see, also no need to have the street a scale width when 20% of that will do.
The book cwclark metioned is a really good place to begin. Go to your PUBLIC LIBRARY, they have a thing called “books on paper” and you can check out these “book” things for free. You will be surprized at how many model RR books there are on the shelf.[swg]
I was going to add my 2 cents but everyone beat me to it. I’ll second the DPM kits. Good quality for the money and they all look great together.