I would like to know how wide a road should be in n scale. The road will be going through a small village. Thanks.
Steve
In N scale 3/4" = 10 feet. Modern US “standard” lane width is 12 feet but lanes may be as narrow as 9 feet on minor roads. Paved shoulders may be 0 feet to 8 feet or more.
A two lane road with 10’ lanes would be 1-1/2" wide plus shoulders. Outside the pavement there are unpaved shoulders (minimum 1 foot wide but usually wider). On poorly maintainsd roads the unpaved shoulder areas are often covered by roadside vegetation.
In towns the paved shoulders will usually be 8’ + wide to allow parallel parking on the pavement, Although in some communities the parking areas are not paved. They would be wider if parking is angled to or perpendicular to the road. Wide enough so that parked autos to not intrude on the traveled way.
Even in a small village, a standard street with two opposing lanes of traffic and paralell parking on both sides would be about 40 feet (two 12-foot traffic lanes and two 8-foot parking lanes) wide. That’s three inches in N scale. Dropping to 10-foot traffic lanes allows you to save about three-tenths of an inch. By the way, the size of the town doesn’t matter; it’s the size of the vehicles and that doesn’t change from New York City to New Mobeetie, Texas.
In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for small villages to have very wide main streets because they used head-in parking, which adds 16-18 feet per side, depending on the angle at which the cars are parked.
Nine feet is really too narrow unless you’re talking about a residential street with only occasional medium truck traffic. Some modern residential streets are 27 feet wide (about two inches in N scale) to cut down on speeding. That works out to two 8-foot parking lanes and an 11-foot-wide traffic lane where vehicles have to yield to each other.
The reason 9-foot lanes are too narrow for a regular city street is trucks. Medium and heavy-duty trucks, like the CMW IH R-190 or Athearn Macks or Ford C are generally eight feet or eight feet, six inches wide, not including mirrors. Even in the 1940s, trucks were eight feet wide, as that was generally the maximum width allowed by state laws until the early 1980s, when wider trucks were permitted on federal highways. The problem is compounded for model railroaders by the fact both CMW and Athearn have over-wide bodies on their trucks.
If you’re really pressed for space, the real world offers some ideas, like one-way streets, restricted on-street parking and such.
Once you’re outside of town, you can drop down to a two-lane road about 1.5 inches wide, that’s two ten-foot lanes. Shoulders can be eight feet wide, as suggested above, but don’t have to be modeled at all, though some provision for drainage is a good idea.