Urban planning in N scale
I am a civic activist interested in urban planning and an urban planner for my N scale towns. After my new layout was up and running 1 September 2012, I pulled two or three dozen scale buildings from my storage boxes where they have been sitting since 1995. I built all of them from about 1979 into the 1990's. My structures range from simple kits to intermediate level kitbashing and scratchbuilding. The tan stucco Southwestern style house closest to me is scratchbuilt. So is the green garage with upper story apartment behind the green house and the two little garages behind the white houses on your left. The other four houses are simple kits with some modifications. The Spanish looking church with twin bell towers is a kitbash of a couple of Swiss churches originally with tall steeples.
What I am doing here is organizing them into a neighborhood that will be realistic for a mid-20th Century small town in the Southwest and will fit into the space on my layout. I am NOT building a housing pod of a sub-urban sprawl subdivision with its excessive lot size, excessive lawns, and lack of sidewalks and street trees. As a New Urbanist, I hate sprawl and seek to ban all new sprawl in the real world. Here I have 13 to 14 inches to use between the highway that parallels the railroad tracks and the future photo background of the Rocky Mountains. Right now you see the houses just sitting on a Woodland Scenics grass mat.
After I layed out and measured the neighborhood, I cut bases from 0.040" sheet styrene from Evergreen Scale Models. Then I cemented front sidewalks from styrene "tile" sheet, driveways from plain sheet styrene, and patios from smaller square "tile" sheet styrene. I do NOT glue my buildings down, but the driveways, walkways, patios, etc. formed alignment keys that "trapped" each building into place on each lot but allow me to remove the buildings from their flat bases for future storage as well as modification. Then I cut the grass mat into various sizes for front, side, and rear lawns and glued them into place. That was a time-consuming experiment that I will not repeat once I've used up all of the grass mat. In a few days I'll add some of the trees I made from a Woodland Scenics kit, but I'll hold off on adding flowers, people, and animals until later.
You can see cardboard templates (cut from cereal boxes) that I used for laying out and cutting the sheet styrene on my Duplicutter. I'm using cardboard strips cut to a scale 24 foot width as temporary roads. There is no use in building permanent roads until I've done some major track work that involves building long grades. Once the grades are in (next year?), I can starting building some terrain including hills with lots of trees, some creeks with bridges, relatively level areas for buildings, and then roads.
Urban planning in N scale
I am a civic activist interested in urban planning and an urban planner for my N scale towns. After my new layout was up and running 1 September 2012, I pulled two or three dozen scale buildings from my storage boxes where they have been sitting since 1995. I built all of them from about 1979 into the 1990's. My structures range from simple kits to intermediate level kitbashing and scratchbuilding. The tan stucco Southwestern style house closest to me is scratchbuilt. So is the green garage with upper story apartment behind the green house and the two little garages behind the white houses on your left. The other four houses are simple kits with some modifications. The Spanish looking church with twin bell towers is a kitbash of a couple of Swiss churches originally with tall steeples.
What I am doing here is organizing them into a neighborhood that will be realistic for a mid-20th Century small town in the Southwest and will fit into the space on my layout. I am NOT building a housing pod of a sub-urban sprawl subdivision with its excessive lot size, excessive lawns, and lack of sidewalks and street trees. As a New Urbanist, I hate sprawl and seek to ban all new sprawl in the real world. Here I have 13 to 14 inches to use between the highway that parallels the railroad tracks and the future photo background of the Rocky Mountains. Right now you see the houses just sitting on a Woodland Scenics grass mat.
After I layed out and measured the neighborhood, I cut bases from 0.040" sheet styrene from Evergreen Scale Models. Then I cemented front sidewalks from styrene "tile" sheet, driveways from plain sheet styrene, and patios from smaller square "tile" sheet styrene. I do NOT glue my buildings down, but the driveways, walkways, patios, etc. formed alignment keys that "trapped" each building into place on each lot but allow me to remove the buildings from their flat bases for future storage as well as modification. Then I cut the grass mat into various sizes for front, side, and rear lawns and glued them into place. That was a time-consuming experiment that I will not repeat once I've used up all of the grass mat. In a few days I'll add some of the trees I made from a Woodland Scenics kit, but I'll hold off on adding flowers, people, and animals until later.
You can see cardboard templates (cut from cereal boxes) that I used for laying out and cutting the sheet styrene on my Duplicutter. I'm using cardboard strips cut to a scale 24 foot width as temporary roads. There is no use in building permanent roads until I've done some major track work that involves building long grades. Once the grades are in (next year?), I can starting building some terrain including hills with lots of trees, some creeks with bridges, relatively level areas for buildings, and then roads.