I have heard mentions of using N scale flats and background buildings on HO layouts to help force the perspective. I am building (slowly) an urban industrial switching layout based loosely on the former Milwaukee Road Deering Line on the northside of Chicago. The layout is L shaped with each leg being 8 feet long and the depth of one leg is 30" while the other is 24". Would using N scale buildingsalong the backdrop work with such limited depth? Or would the scale difference look odd and not achieve the desired effect I am after. I havent had much luck searching for images, and before I drop money on yet another kit I was hoping for a little help.
Damon,
Have You looked at Walther’s Cornerstone Backround building kits? I have quite a few of them on my HO-scale industrial switching area and they work great. Some are only two inches in depth and I have put interiors in them, that can be seen through the windows and doors, with the lights on.
Click on link and look and see if they will work for You:
http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3252
Take Care!
Frank
A member of our club has done this successfully, but not with urban scenes. He did it with several farms on his largely rural Pennsylvania and Maryland based layout. However, the areas where he did this were “deeper” than 24". In some places it is nearly 4’ deep. He not only used N scale structures, but the trees and other scenic elements were made gradually smaller in the transition from the HO to N scale elements. This effectively portrays the illusion of distance.
Good luck,
Tom
Damon,
I’ll try to come up with some example pics. In this first one, it’s kinda busy, but gives you a sense of how it works in the larger perspective. In the right upper corner, the mill building dominates, but just to the left of that and above the airplane you can see past the mill and uphill to several company houses. They are N scale from Grandt Line. The cool thing is that you can get the same basic houses in HO (and I think O also). I have HO scale ones in the foreground elsewhere on the layout, so they all tie together in the mind’s eye.
I already have a few of the Walthers back ground buildings as well as a few from Radical Flats which are the printed photos. With those two options I get some depth, but only about a city block. I was hoping to add the feeling that the city really spread out past the foreground structures, this will be Chicago afterall.
Since I have only have a 30" maximum depth I may be trying to squeeze in too much into too little of a space. But my thinking was if I had full size buildings in HO, slim background buildings in HO, Radical Flats in slightly less than HO and finally N flats I may be able to pull off the effect I’m looking for.
Here’s a nice cabin in the woods. It’s N scale, above HOn3 track below out of sight…
Here’s a better shot of the company houses behind the mill. It’s good when the effect works from more than one angle.
Another thing that helps here is that the houses are at eye level or above.
Keep in mind that anything that help establish forced perspective, nit just buildings. In this pic, way at the top of th pass, are a N scale herdsman, his dog, and a flock of sheep.
The green truck descending to the left is also N scale.
In this pic, the lower two trucks, the Toyota LandCruiser FJ78 and the Land Rover Defender 109, as HO, with the green truck in the distance establishing perspective.
Aircraft also work. In this pic, the C130 is around 1:110 IIRC, while the distant WB-29 is somewhere around N scale (1:144)
