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Scenery - Streets Articles

Blacktop Roads

The author uses sandpaper as the foundation for blacktop roads. Includes step-by-step photos, building complex road systems, lines, and installation.

Concrete Bag Retaining Walls

The author provides two photos where a small retaining wall was made out of bags of concrete.

Crash Barriers

How to build crash barriers to protect the grade crossing signals.

Creating Realistic Roads

Making scale roads using styrene or joint compound, and then painting and striping them.

Creating Realistic Roads

Using plexiglass to make realistic-looking roads. Includes tips on how to weather the road surface.

Details, Details, Details

Adding small signs to your layout that indicate local names that non-railroading visitors may recognize when they come to visit.

Details, Details, Details

Ideas for things to model that still remain from days-gone-by, such as hitching posts, abandoned rail in the street, old building foundations, etc.

Easy Highway Striping with an Airbrush

Charlie shows step-by-step how he creates solid yellow center stripes for roads. He also shows that a template can be used to make dashed lines.

Grade Crossings

Modeling modern rubber and older wood crossings. Complete installation photos.

Hanging Signs

How to create models of signs that hang off of buildings.

Highway Billboards from the 1930s and 40s

The article describes how to build these large signs, and includes scaled drawings as well as sample signs for Ford and Esso in the various modeling scales.

Maintenance Road

The author shows how he built a dirt road into existing mountain scenery without doing too much damage to the layout.

Make Your Own Jersey Barriers

The author shows how he created the master for these highway barriers, and then cast them.

Modeling City Alleyways

The author describes how he modeled an alleyway at the backs of businesses. Also covers making the street surface, adding foundations to existing buildings, and making electricity poles with wiring. Includes many photos and a parts list. There is also a sidebar on how to make street lamp shades.

Modeling Old-time Dirt Roads

Before the automobile replaced the horse and wagon, most roads were dirt, and due to the pounding of horses' hooves and the narrow wagon wheels, they had a different look, which the author describes how he models them.

Modeling Streets and Roads Part 2

Using sand paper to model gravel roads.

Modeling Streets and Roads Part 3A

Asphalt.

Modeling Streets and Roads Part 3B

Asphalt using Route 66's HO and N scale paper roads.

Modeling Streets and Roads Part 4A

How to model concrete streets.

Modeling Streets and Roads Part 4C

Concrete roads. Simulate the real world by pouring hydrocal. Use similar construction techniques. Shows how to create cracks in the concrete and highlight them with india ink. Also shows how to paint white strips down the middle of the road.

Modeling Streets and Roads - Concrete Part 4B

Model construction, and prototype photos.

Modeling the Holiday Season

The author presents the various solutions her and her husband have found to temporarily decorate their HO-scale layout for the Christmas holidays. Ideas include wreaths, garland, blow-up yard decorations, street light decorations, a lit Christmas tree, hanging signs, town square display, and figures.

More Lore...

Modeling trash around the streets and tracks.

Pathways to Detail

The author takes a close look at street sidewalks, and how we can model them with extra details such as cracks, slopes, gutters, repair patches, weeds in the cracks, etc.

Paving the Town

The author shares his techniques for creating more realistic roads, such as using brick gutters, modeling track in the streets, making sidewalk freight elevators, and creating manhole covers.

Prefabricated Streets

Using mat board to simulate streets and sidewalks, including manholes, curbs, and parking spots.

Protect That Intersection

Adding animated lights via street traffic signals. The author uses LEDs to create HO-scale single-head, two-head, and overhead traffic lights. Construction and final product photos are included. Also covered is the construction of the electronic circuit that drives the traffic lights (both home-made and ready-made circuit boards and parts are discussed, including parts lists), how to power the circuit, and wiring the traffic lights.

Proto-View

Profile engineering drawings from the Department of Transportation of Wisconsin of a typical street.

S Gauge Streetlight

Building a street light from acid core solder.

S-curves

The author lists various companies that make S-scale details for enhancing street and right-of-way scenes.

Scale-changed Gas Light

The author describes how he converted an HO-scale lamp for his O-scale layout, and how a similar change could be made for modeling one in S-scale.

Scratchbuilt Road Signs

The author shares, with lots of photos, how he built his own roadway signs using online research tools.

Short and Easy

Paul Raham shares how he makes sidewalks.

Signs of the Times

The author shares a collection of prototype signs that offer a bit of humor.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere...

The author describes where you can find, and how you can produce, S-scale signs for your layout. Includes several prototype photos, and step-by-step model photos.

Taking it to the Streets

Adding details to roadways, including cracks, a construction site, and junk.

The Scenery Clinic XVIII

The authors show how they created structure foundations, roads, and parking lots using anchor bolt cement, including "burying" rails in concrete.

Trash and Garbage

The author describes how he models refuse.