This posting is just to offer up some free advice - nothing controversial…
My first layout was in 1956, and I’ve had one most of the time since then. My latest was started in 2008, and is now in the detail scenery stage.
One thing I have tended to neglect in all of my layouts is a consideration of roads and highways. The track design is pretty darn good (IMO of course), and the rails serve the various industries quite well.
While I did mark out a road here and a road there, it wasn’t until the final stages did I realize they were just not given the proper respect. Go to any rail served industry and you will find a whole lot more space given to road vehicle usage, as opposed to rail.
Happily, I figured out a solution to my dilemna this morning, and the resulting roadways should end up being somewhat sensical. But if I had given it the same thought and consideration to them in the design phase, I would be a lot further along in the process.
Ha, I’m the guy that always touts “plan, plan, and plan some more” before building anything…
I agree, roads in all their forms are important. I can’t say that I’ve planned mine, but I have tried to take inspiration from each site and added them before I got to the stage of adding ground cover, etc.
I use Sculptamold and that makes it easy to add a road. It lays down and forms easily, while allowing for different textures. You can also embed things like brick, etc to get different looks.
My other favorite road materials are the long sheets of 3" and 4" wide basswood. Paint them concrete and they turn out pretty darn good. If you get it thin enough, you can butt it right against the rails so the rolling stock wheels and trucks clear. Great for street running and industrial areas.
Roads can take a lot of work For the type I do, one slip of an xacto and the illusion can be ruined. So most of my roads are off layout with min. on layout.
Since I like structures, and lots of them, my layout must have roads. I found that it was best to design scenes with all of these elements included, so I now have graduated from “footprints” of buildings to cardstock mock-ups, which allows me to place them and determine where the roads can go.
Aisles, though, are an important part of my road network. I’ve found that making a closed system of roads, as if I were building a true “island” layout, just isn’t reasonable. Instead, roads reach the edge or the back of the layout and, I suppose, connect back in somewhere else.
I’ve just ordered the electronics for some crossing signals and even gates. So, I’m bringing the roads into even closer contact with the trains.
I admit that most of the roads on my layout are virtual (in the aisleway, behind the first line of hills…) Those that I’m modeling tend to be the ones that directly interact with the trains (at grade crossings or by the presence of overpasses and underpasses) or glimpses of the, ‘Two ruts in the mud,’ goat trail that more or less (mostly less) parallels the Tomikawa Tani Tetsudo.
Even in 1964 the area I’m modeling had a rather primitive road network, including vast areas of forest with nothing more significant that footpaths. A lot of ‘urban’ streets in the (something short of major) towns were hard-packed earth.
The local bus and taxi company headquarters is about the size of a corner gas station. On street parking doesn’t happen - if you don’t have off-street parking (usually, but not always, a carport) you don’t buy a car. Commercial trucks are short bobtails, not semis. (One exception that I want to try to model - a ‘nine wheeler.’ Tricycle tractor with rear duals, normal one-axle semitrailer similar in size to a modern ‘pup.’) There’s a little vehicle space at the freight houses, adequate for the pickups and three wheelers that handle local deliveries. In-town transit is mostly by bicycle.
The moral? Keeping motor vehicles (and their drivers) happy wasn’t a high priority with the local governmental authorities in Central Japan half a century ago. Twenty years later things would be VERY different.
I didn’t do much in the way of formal planning for my layout, although much of it was already worked out in my mind.
For urban areas, there’d need to be some provision for roads and especially for crossings, and every community on the layout has at least one crossing. Dunnville, the largest of the modelled towns, has its busiest on Walnut St.:
…and another nearby in the industrial district:
…where there’s a little street-running, too:
…and a couple of streets which dead-end at the tracks:
There are a couple of private crossings in town, too. The one in the foreground crosses the siding into Hoffentoth Bros. Ice, while the other crosses the former main line, allowing access to a yard office, located in the former interlocking tower at what was once Airline Junction:
The next town down the line is South Cayuga. It’s the least-developed of the towns currently on the layout, as evidenced by the unfinished structures an
The Era that you are modeling plays an important part in the design of the roads. A Steam era railroad would have dirt roads in most industrial areas and the vehicle areas would not be all that spacious. The same can be said for any older city.
A modern layout would have ample area for large vehicles to enter and leave with as little effort as possible, and of course, the vehicles of today are much larger. Mayhap you are old enough to remember the Divco milk trucks, the kind where the driver was standing up? I was watching the milk truck make its delivery here yesterday morning. An 18 wheel tractor trailer it was, it pulls in our narrow driveway, up to the garage, and then must back into the parking lot between the monastery and the power house until it reaches the kitchen. Not much room there, but the semi drivers that serve our location (several each week) have it down pat.
In Manhattan, the Gimbles department store had its truck enterance on 32nd street, a narrow 2 lane road with parking on both sides, and he had to back that trailer into the building. Some could do it in five minutes, others took a full 20 minutes before they could clear the street to let traffic flow again.
So bottom line on the railroad is: Build what you have room for, and I’ll find a prototype that matches it.
I also planned for roads on my little switching layout - it’s so small everything had to be at least “generalized”. Doesn’t mean the plan will survive the battle, but there is a plan!
