Urban Roadways
My layout is an urban one, and thus roads and cars are an important part of the scenery. For all of that, there aren’t as many as I would like. The Urban Station scene has one long avenue with a couple of connecting roads, but it’s largely out of sight behind the station. The Avenue continues over the riverbank beside a park to an intersection with the road at the edge of the Riverside Station scene, but that road is short and almost immediately leaves the edge of the layout. The avenue then continues under the Expressway and across the large river into the Village portion of the River Crossing scene, where it intersects a couple of side streets before exiting under the tracks. The Hilltop scene will eventually have a small road as well.
Modeling techniques are describe on the Cars and Roads page, and this page will focus on the actual road scenes, although as yet there isn’t all that much to show.
The reference information on streets in Tōkyō has been relocated from this page to the new Roads and Highways page in the Prototype section. In addition there is an overview of construction techniques given in the Cars and Roads page of the Model Trains section.
River Crossing Scene - The Village
In the Village area, the commercial avenue enters via a bridge and exits into the backdrop beneath the railroad tracks. The backdrop has a photo with a similar avenue positioned to continue the road.
Test Photo, showing layout and temporary foam-core bridge - white car on right marks location of one side street leading into the intersection, the other is behind the brown building obscured by the tree.
River Crossing Scene - Embankment
On the far side of the river from the Village area, the avenue runs along the top of the embankment, leading to both the Urban Station and Riverside Station scenes. There will be a park along the embankment under the expressway.
View of embankment under the expressway, with the old foam-core expressway deck (since removed) and the foam-core bridge across the river. The roadway on the embankment is just gray paint on foam at this point, but will eventually receive some other surface.
Riverside Station Scene
There isn’t much roadway in the Riverside Station scene, just a short bit past some houses and across the tracks by the station, then down and across a bridge and under the tracks towards the fascia.
Possible (not final) layout with placeholder bridge. The road may extend along both sides of the tracks (or not) and cross down near the overhead expressway to reach the main part of the avenue (which goes both down to the large bridge, and off to the right to reach the Urban Station scene).
Urban Station Scene
Eventually there will be an extension of the commercial avenue behind the station, with bus and taxi stands under the viaduct, and several side streets intersecting the avenue.
The Avenue will run behind the viaduct, although exactly how is something I keep changing my mind on. As you can see, there really isn’t enough space for buildings on both sides, and there need to be buildings against the backdrop to disguise it. I may give up and have the avenue run under the viaduct and out the front instead, and just put a couple of other front-to-back roads in as well. There is much more planning to be done here.
