Are there any standards, rules or guidelines for scaling down prototype scenery? My new layout will incorporate several sections which by nature are just portions of existing areas. My question is when I take certain elements - the size of the element in HO scale is way too big to model - ex: I am modeling a building that in real life is 750 feet long. In HO that would be over 8.6 feet. I’m thinking of scaling it to 1/5 - making it a little over 20 inches. In playing with numbers 1/5th seems to be about the right ratio for scaling down elements for my layout. Another example is my commuter GO Train. My model has three coaches where the real one has 15 or more. Any feedback on if it makes sense to stick to a 1/5th ratio? Obviously for certain elements it won’t work - ex: Scaling buildings on a street to 1/5th size would not look right - probably better to either skip a block or two from a prototype street or skip buildings. How have you dealt with this issue?
Dear Aralai
You are right. It’s all about proportions. When you scale down your house with 1/5, your floors will come only 2 feet apart and you end up with a living room only 3 feet wide. So skipping seems the only way out.
But we can do a bit more. In Amsterdam a 100 yrs ago a row of five wharehouses were being build. They were build with concrete cubes; each cube was about 18’x18’x18’. Every wharehouse was 20 cubes long and 8 cubes high.(and 6 cubes deep). When you reduce the size of the cubes a bit (14x14x14) almost nobody will notice. Make the building with a bit lesser cubes (15 long and 6 high) too, but porportionally, the length of the wharehouse is reduced to almost 1/2 the original size. On MRR-Beerline the brewery buildings also turned out to half the original size; 1/2 in length, width and heigth (so 1/8 in volume).
If you have seen pictures of Chuck Hitchcock new layout you can see how these building still dwarf the trains. But “his” footprint is 26’x54’. A building can look right on his layout while on yours it’s way too big. Mocking up with shoeboxes or temporarely paper buildings is a nice way to find out what is working for you.
The process of reducing is called selective compression, there are no standards. But big buildings should remain big. Kansas City Bottom buildings only two or three story’s high? You’r not in the Bottoms any more.
I tried to figure out how your trackplan is turning out, seems promising.
good luck
Paul
The only standards or rules are those which you impose on yourself - and those are different for each modeler.
The terms you are looking for are selective compression and forced perspective. Which applies is determined by the proximity to the rails:
-
If the thing is close to the fully-modeled trains, you can selectively compress. Your three car GO train can get away with a 250-foot long platform, saving 1000 feet when compared to the prototype. That l-o-o-ng warehouse, with 16 doors to handle 16 ‘standard for then and there’ cars, can be modeled with three or four doors. A wall with nine identical-size bays can be shortened to five…
-
OTOH, if the ‘thing’ (road, tree or building) is well back from the rails but still in front of the backdrop, then a reduced scale can be used. N-scale (or smaller) buildings in the ‘hills’ beyond the yard perimeter, a 1/700 scale wheel excavator 'way back yonder, shrunken landscapes or city scenes on the backdrop itself (or a flat just this side of the ‘sky.’) Little balls of fluff representing forest giants…
Both techniques are valid, but mixing them can be an ‘iffy’ proposition unless you have a well-developed feel for the artistry involved.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
It’s more an art than a science I think, it’s more what “looks right” in a given situation. Selectively compressing the width of a long warehouse or factory, but keeping the height, can create a very realistic model. This as Chuck notes is different from forced perspective, where all 3 dimensions are scaled down for a background building to make it look farther away than it actually is.
As far as trains, it depends on the layout too. If you were looking at a 15 car train in real life, you’d not be able to see the front car and back car at the same time. To get the same feel in HO scale, you’d probably need at least 5-6-7 cars I’d think.
Thanks all for great answers. It will help a lot. Hoping to get the layout drafted soon.
Think of your layout in terms of a theater set. Some elements don’t actually have to be there, they just have to LOOK like they’re there. F’rinstance, you might have a stream that runs diagonally across the layout, obviously, once it hits the back wall, it has to disappear, probably to a point behind some trees or a building.
Digital photography with small cameras that can be dropped anywhere on the layout challenges this notion, but you can still work with proportions that create the feel you want, without necessarily using the exact scale.
Now, being an avid proponent of all things N scale, I would humbly suggest that if you want big buildings and appropriately long trains, (your 3 coach GO train can stretch out to about 6 cars in the same space in Nice scale) that you consider the 1:160 world…
F’rinstance, this facility occupies approximately 4 square feet of actual real estate, but it has enough room not only for believably large buildings, it can also handle 25 to 30 cars during an operating session! Here’s an overview of the whole shebang…
The overall dimensions of the scene you see is 36" from left to right, and there’s about 4’ between the camera and wall behind the mountain. The aformentioned square footage is located between the tracks that split in the foreground.
One of the tricks I employed to “expand the scene” was to place this busy complex in the middle of a junction between the main line and a branch (the track that splits off to the left). Both lines loop around behind the plant, and change elevation significantly.
There are no standards, its what you think looks right. Don’t worry about a uniform scenery compression, you won’t get one compression factor to work out uniformly. So if the streets are 1/2 full size, a house is 75%, a tree 50% and an industry is 25% horizontally and 80% vertically, don’t sweat it.
Trunkating seems to be a term a lot of modelers like to use, meaning making a structure fit the given area in which we have to work. We as model railroad builders suffer from almost the same constraints as the prototypers did, money& space. There are pleanty of examples on real riaroad where something larger may have worked better but they had to work with in their boundries. Haven’t you ever seen a real building wedged inbetween two sets of tracks? In general our entire layout even the most prototypical one you’ll ever see makes sacrafices for space. Generallly in the real world you never see the amount of stuff in a scaled area on a model railroad as you do on the real thing. The problem is when we try to fit too much stuff IE: Mountains, tunnels, bridges, roundhouses, turntables, farms, factories, towns etc etc. into a space we wind up with a hodge podge of “stuff” cramed into an unbelieveable mess. If you want to do that buy a set of Lionel trains and go at it. Not trying to bash those guys buut have you ever seen how much stuff they can cram on to a 4x8 sheet of plywood amazing but not very real looking.
I have found the use of mock up structres to prove invaluable, build a quick structure out of cardboard or foamcore and place it where your thinking of placing the real model structure and leave it for a couple of days to see if it fits or works for you.
Thanks again for the great input 