I am planning to build a model high rise building for my N scale layout. How tall would the model be if it were 220 meteres in real life? Would it be 1.37 meters? I am not sure how to do the conversion. I am planning on modelling a small area of downtown Calgary near the tracks.
Most model skyscrapers are not precisely to scale–a lot depends on how much space you have available, but even the biggest layout I’ve ever seen (the one in the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry) didn’t feature skyscrapers that were exactly to scale.
How much space do you have available for a cityscape? One does not find giant skyscrapers sitting out by themselves in the middle of a field–they are built high because the land around them has already been built up with relatively tall buildings. So in addition to one’s skyscraper, you’d want a couple blocks of other city buildings around it.
Second, how close will it be to the tracks? In the era of skyscrapers, heavy railroad lines usually don’t come too near to the section of downtown featuring the shiny buildings–even in railroad-heavy towns like Chicago, the skyscrapers are in the background and the buildings closest to the tracks are conventional-sized buildings.
So, with both of these things in mind, it might actually be to your advantage to make a skyscraper that is a bit under scale, and put it in the background. For your 220 meter building in N scale, a building 80-100 cm tall in the background of a cityscape a meter or two wide, and 30-50 cm behind the tracks, would be big enough to loom majestically over the smaller 3-5 story buildings around it without totally overshadowing everything.
Try building a cardboard mock-up of the building and set it on your layout to get an idea of how big it would be, then you can easily mess with the proportions and location until you get a balance that you like–and a cardboard mockup is easy to make.
Once you actually get to the building of the building, I recommend the technique in Kalmbach’s BUILDING CITY SCENERY FOR YOUR MODEL RAILROAD for making skyscrapers. This involves building the walls out of large sheets of Plexiglas, and then applying strips of vinyl adhesive tape horizontally (representing the divisions of floors and the bottoms of windows
Maxx;
N scale is 1:160. and 220/160 = 1.375, so your math is correct.
Now to further J’s comment, trains typically do not come with a 1000 m of a 50+ story building, or 6.25 m on you N scale layout…Start thinking about forced perspective.
Actually, he could model a skyscraper relatively close to the tracks without it looking unrealistic. The southern approach tracks to Chicago’s Union Station, for example, pass smaller buildings enroute to the bumper posts…but one can easily see tall skyscrapers above the concourse as well as sleek highrises which line the Chicago River less than a block east of Union Station. Placing a towering highrise above the tracks would look mighty fine and would also prove interesting given the limited number of urban landscapes being modeled in comparison to their rural counterparts.
That was kind of my point–they’re in the background. Looming like the big things they are in the background, but not quite next to the tracks, either. The plus side of this is being able to use forced perspective to model a bigger building slightly farther off, rather than having to settle for a smaller building right next to the tracks.
You can still get a good-sized building next to the tracks, of course–especially in an older city setting,where trolleys ran near downtowns. In that case, perhaps a “shadow box” approach, like that thread a while back on how to model full-size redwoods in O scale, might be in order.
that method that’s in the Kalmbach book for building skyscrapers that someone mentioned, was from an issue of MODEL RAILROADER-I beleive the author said sometime in 1990.
The voice of sanity here: Having a structure as tall as a water heater in the middle of an N scale layout will look silly. Forget about it.
Randy
My thoughts exactly. I would not model a skycraper without modeling at least 3 or 4 other somewhat smaller ones around it to create a skyline effect. Would be much more realisitic, I think. I would then surround those structures with smaller, 5-10 story structures. I would basically work my way back down to regular structure height.
Gary Hoover created a very realistic cityscape effect on his old layout, the Missouri, Kansas & Quincy by using N scale structures on an HO layout. What about using Z scale skyscrapers in the background on your N scale layout?
Ed
Are there Z scale skyscrapers available? Scratchbuilding them with the aforementioned method, at a Z-ish scale, might be the answer. A two-foot skyscraper among a cluster of semi-tall N scale buildings would looke pretty impressive, especially with a backdrop of other skyscrapers behind it.