Can anyone help with dimensions of streets sidewalks and curbs? i am coming up pretty much empty looking thru my MRR issues and what train books I currently have. I did find a dimension for a street at 25 scale feet I imagine that is a 2 lane street with out street parking? I`d like 2 lane, 2 lane with parking on 1 side and 2 lane with parking on both sides. also sidewalk widths and where the lines go I was thinking of using .060 sheet plastic for building bases/sidewalks? does that sound right I read somewhere curbs are .080X.080 plastic square scribed in 4 scale feet increments.
Thanks for your time and I apologize for the questions
Street width varies. Truth be told, you usually don’t have enough room on the typical layout to use prototype street widths. I try to size them up to look right, even if they are narrow.
Residential sidewalks are typically 4’ wide. Downtown, it’s usually wider, with 8’ being about right for model purposes. Again, you may not be able to be that generous everywhere.
I tend to use balsa and, more and more, basswood, since it’s smoother. Balsa stills works for very worn concrete, while basswood is a better choice for most other purposes. I’ve also used model aircraft plywood, although it’s a little too smooth. Plastic will work, but you have to work more on it to get it to look good as concrete IMO, assuming you’re talking HO. Plastic would work OK in N, I’d think.
As mentioned above, there is a lot of variation in street and sidewalk widths.
Sidewalk height is also variable. In HO 6" height would be .068" and an 8" would be .091". Your .08x.08 should look fine for your curb edges with an appropriate width sheet the same thickness for the sidewalk. The sidewalk blocks are usually square, their actual dementions varing with the width of the sidewalk.
There is a company that makes sidewalks, they look pretty good, check my photobucket, some pixs may show them, I’m sure you can get them from Walthers.
Concrete sidewalks usually are broken up into 4’x4’ squares by the expansion joints, so I use 8 feet wide for a main street sidewalk and 4 feet for a side street sidewalk.
For streets, I use 30’ for 2 lanes. Parallel parking spaces add about 8 feet per side.
Lately, I have been pouring streets and sidewalks using Durhams Water Putty. I make the first pour the full width including sidewalks, and maybe building foundations as well. Then super glue styrene 6x6 to the street to make the curb, using that as the form to pour the sidewalk.
This is how Central St looked with streets and sidewalks poured and wet sanded smooth just before painting. You can see street centerlines and parking space limits marked in pencil. Before I paint, I use a hobby knife and straightedge to score a light line to guide painting street centerlines and parking space lines after the street is painted. I also score the expansion joints on the sidewalks.
I do not know which sidewalk GAPPLEG used, in the past I have used Smalltown “City Sidewalks”. They are styrene, 10 ft wide and have lines on the back to cut down to 5 ft. Details include curbs, rounded corner pieces, curb cuts for alleyway entrances, and storm drain entrances in the curb with a manhole cover http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/699-7000
There are a number of other companies that make sidewalks as well.
Have you placed your buildings or mock ups to see what your final result might look like? I assume you’re considering at a downtown business district type of scene.
I think you’ll find that 2 lanes with sidewalks, plus 2 lanes of parking consumes a lot of space. I personally think that modeling to exact scale looks too wide. I’ve also read where other modelers feel the same and tend to model the streets and sidewalks slightly narrower than scale for this reason. For my downtown scene, I only use 1 lane of parking and have spaced the lanes such that there appears to be enough space for three scale vehicles to fit side by side. Although, I don’t place them side by side in the scene because that gives away the out of scale dimensions.
I suggest mocking it up first to see if you have enough space and how it looks before you start cutting.
Since the 1970’s or earlier in most States a “standard” travel lane is 12’ wide, a parallel parking lane 8’ wide, a rural shoulder 8’ wide. Most roads and streets are not “standard” including many that are recently constructed.
This site has links to Standard Highway plans & drawings for the various States.
Local streets in our town are 40’ wide. A little generous perhaps, but you have to put all of that snow somewhere.
As was said, you have to do what looks right to your eye. And you may want to force perspectives. The street by the tracks (near the front of the table) may be in HO scale, while a street further back might look good in N scale, even if it is physically only a few inches from the first street.
LION models NYC, and so a street like 7th Avenue with four traffic lanes and two parking lanes plus wide sidewalks would hardly leave room for any trains. I will only model one traffic lane and the rest of the street will be “in the isle.”
Please yourself, take some pictures of it, and the rest of us will be happy with the results.
This scene is very close to the front of my HO scale layout.
The streets are made with Durhams Water Putty. The sidewalks are .040 styrene sheets. I painted them a slightly lighter shade of gray than the streets, and marked the sidewalk blocks with a number 2 pencil.
As the Lion pointed out, streets vary widely in width. The one shown here is 3 inches wide, while the cross street is only 2 1/2 inches wide. Realistically, that’s too narrow, but the citizens of Moose Bay are accustomed to using the subways to go downtown, so parking isn’t an issue.
The main street that runs through my subdivision is narrower than code. The developer pulled a fast one to “save costs”, (i.e. stole profits), and apparently nobody policed the construction. What was approved or what is the “standard” is not the actual width of the street.
Another example supporting the idea that you should make your streets at whatever width looks good to you, within reason. Exact measurements aren’t that important.
The size of sidewalk squares is something of a local issue.
In much of Chicago the city placed five foot squares, which suggests also that the sidewalks were all five feet wide. I suppose in older neighborhoods it might be different but I grew up in an area on the west side that had been built in the early 20’s and they were all the same.
I’ve also seen sidewalks that were divided down the center and all squares are two feet giving a four foot wide walk.
It can be what ever you want and you really don’t even need to be consistent as city codes change and developers are sometimes more or less willing to give up structure size to such things as easements and walk ways.
A good color for sidewalks is Polly S aged concrete.
When I went to lay streets on my N scale layout, after researching the widths of “real” streets, I decided that they would take up too much real estate. I realized that, like many things in our modelling, I would have to use selective compression. I lined up a number of vehicles in two rows and adjusted the distance between the rows until it looked reasonable without crowding. I added a third row for parking and measured what I came up with. I went with that. Now if I were modelling rush hours with bumper to bumper traffic, it would look too crowded, but my little country town doesn’t have rush hours. With the vehicles spaced at random locations along the street the eye has no chance to see how close they would be to each other if they were passing each other. It looks right to me and that’s all that matters in the end.
Typical lane width varied from era to era. From 1915-about 1940 a typical road lane woudl be 9 feet. From the 40’s to the late 50’s it woudl be 10-12 feet. As noted above from the 1970’s to date, the typical lane width is 12 feet. In urban areas, we may use an 11 foot lane width to save on right of way and to get a little wider parking lane. Paking lanes would range from 6 feet (in urban areas with tight right of way) to 10 feet. If the parking lane is any wider than 10 feet, it is considered a driving lane.
Curbs, are generaly 6 inches wide. Where there is a gutter, the gutter is generally 2 feet wide.
If you want angle parking on your streets, the parking rea will be 20 feet wide. This is why angle parking is banned in many urban areas.
Sidealks are generally five feet wide (all eras). In an urban area where the sidewalk is adjacent to the curb, the walk should be at least 6 feet wide. As mentioned above, the sidwalk widths in urban areas are generally defined by each municipality, based on pedestrian traffic. In a central business district, I would expect a sidewalk to be 10 feet wide to accommodate pedestrians walking in two directions.
These are the dimensions we use in the State of Wisconsin. In my travels, I have noticed most states have similar standards. I am a hihgway dewsign engineer, that is why I used the word “we” in the discussion.
I tried to follow these standards on my own N scale layout, but found that this uses a lot of space. I woudl recommend as noted in above posts that you mock up the widths to something that looks good.
