Also seems like the sidewalks are a little wide also.Im building a shelf layout around the second floor of my home and space is limited.I want to put a street with sidewalks but the street system takes too much room.If I used sheet plastic would it look good??Does anyone else make sidewalks??I thought Smalltown did but I cant find them listed anywhere anymore.What color looks good for streets?Also,has anyone used hot glue to lay cork roadbed and track??Thanks for your help in advance.
The Walthers Street System is scaled out so you have a scale full two lanes of traffic and parking. That tends to make thigns quite wide. There are plenty of cases were streets are narrower so If you want to you can use something narrowwer. Sheet Styrene would look OK. For Side walks use square scribed styrene in the size that looks appropriet for you. Just make sure is not to small or your scale figures will look to large. I would suggest if you make your streeds out of styrene. Make the street so the same piece of styrene is also the base layer for the foundation of your buildings to. that way you can control how everthing gets intigrated. The nice thing about stryrne. you can paint it a deep flat black for fresh asphalt. a wheathered dark gray for old asphalt. Light to medium gray for concrete.
As for hot glue laying corg roadbed and track. Its feasable to do that way. But the hot glue doesn’t leave much working time and the way I fumble with things. The hot glue dries leaving things in a messed up funky nagle that I then have to fix, so I tend to use the old standbye of glueing cork down with white glue or carpenters glue and using track spikes to secure flex track down.
James
http://www.rixproducts.com/model_railroad_kits.htm
Somewhere on this site is a sidewalk that you can adjust the width. It looks pretty good.
(I know this is the site, you’ll just have to search for it.)
IHC hobbies also makes sidewalks and scenicexpress.com also lists a couple of road and sidewalk companies.(Noch, Busch, Heki).
Tim,
I originally tried using the Cornerstone brick street system and, like you, felt it overwhelmed my scenery. Given that I’m modelling the early 50s, I didn’t see it as a problem to scale back my street widths. I chose to use sheet styrene, painted black as others have suggested. I also used Evergreen sidewalk sheets. Using 1 square HO widths, I just stacked two up to get a raised sidewalk. He’s what I’ve got now:
I’m still working on matching the sidewalk color to the sidewalks that came with my Cornerstone Merchant kits.
Good luck and post pics when you are done.
EdW