Now that I have gotten some good suggestions on making roads, I need some prototype info.
How wide should a road be? The roads on my layout will be a 2 lane highway, city streets (with room for paralell parking), and a single lane gravel road.
Should the highway (runs through the town) be higher than the city streets?
When marking the lines, is there anything special I should know, or is it pretty self-explanatory? The method I will probably be using is the spray-paint through a slot in an index card.
What about continuous lines, like on the shoulder?
Back in the early fifties, Popular Mechanics and Mechanix illustrated used to talk about doing tests on 8.5’ or 9’ lanes for their rather extensive car tests. Then IIR, around 1956-58 they went to a 10’ lane. This was ostensibly to match the “Typical” lane width at the time. I believe a number of years ago, I measured the street in front of my house, also 50s era, and it was 28’ wide. That gives 2 traffic and one parking lane. A bit over 9’ per lane.
Also, a few years ago, I was taking a Freightliner Century tractor through some highway. Width was 102" over the mirrors. The mirrors sometimes overhung the lane lines. There were a couple signs (on an older section of interstate) that stated there was a 96" (8’) width limit. Most highways, though, have a lot more room, probably between 11’ or 12’. City streets may be a little narrower. For a model, I’d just set up the roadway to give the lanes maybe a foot wider than the widest regular vehicle in your collection, at least for city and country.
For modern major highways, use 12’ per lane (some municipalities even require 24’ for the 2 lanes in parking lots!); older roads 10’-12’; older city streets 10’ per lane. The parallel parking width should be 8’ (older) or 9’ (newer). As mentioned above, don’t forget shoulders (as they often do here in PA) which can be quite wide on major highways these days (probably 8’).
Dante
PS. Regarding lines, just observe what they do in your area or check online for the government public works or highway or transportation department guidelines. Typically solid white lines separating the shoulder; solid white lines or double yellow separating lanes in no-passing/no-lane-changing zones; dashed white lines where passing or lane-changing is allowed.
Normally a conventional highway through a city is built to the same standards as similar non highway streets. Only signing distinguishing it. If traffic is heavy it may have more lanes and/or parking restricted. This is also true for non highways.
Look at Google Maps Street View for ideas on what streets and highways look like
Even once you find out how wide prototype roads are, my own suggestion is to make your model roads slightly narrower, but still “drivable” looking.
I use the Walthers concrete street sections for my layout’s city streets, and then for a more rural/suburban parkway I actually measured it with a tape measure and made it prototype width. Well that was a surprise – in reality the city street should be wider but I soon saw that on my layout the rural parkway was going to be wider, until I took corrective action. Roads can (and, as a rule, I think should) be selectively compressed in the interests of overall proportions: thoroughfares wider than streets which are wider than parkways which are wider than lanes which are wider than alleys.
This is particularly true now that we have more accurate scale vehicles than we did years back, when most vehicles were oversized for HO.
When US highways were first built, they generally went town to town rather than bypassing them as the later Interstate highways did. So to an extent they would build the highway to connect with a city street at one end of town, and then start again to build the highway on the other end of town. Since the city street was now a part of the US highway system, the US would pay or reimburse the city for repaving the street but otherwise it would be maintained just like any other city street.
Just as an aside, the street I grew up on (67th street, in Richfield Minnesota) was in my neighborhood only about 2 blocks longs, connecting with a large street (Lyndale Avenue) at one end, and ending at a “T” at the MN&S railroad tracks on Pleasant Ave. (my house was on the corner of 67th and Pleasant). At one point the city wanted to block off 67th from Lyndale but found out that if they did it would cost them a lot of money…at some point in the past, 67th St. was part of a state highway, and everytime the city paved the streets in my neighborhood the city would have to reimburse the city for the costs of repaving 67th street.
Another thing that might be interesting to model, Xerxes Ave. is the boundary between Richfield and Edina MN. The cities for many decades couldn’t agree on a joint plan to work the street together, so sometimes Edina would tear up it’s side of the street and repave it while leaving the Richfield side alone, or a big snow would hit and Richfield would plow it’s side of the street but not the other side. Eventually I think they came to agreement on taking turns or something.