Model Railroad Blog

Damn.  The last thing I wanted to do was have to modify the bench work.  After a few days of rationalization I swallowed the bitter pill, realized I hadn’t made it deep enough, and added an extension which adds three inches to the depth.

In the continual quest to be more effective in our efforts to “model a railroad” we are constantly trying to root out and eliminate modeling approaches that tip the viewer off to the fact that, “hey, that isn’t real”.  I’m not sure which is harder, developing an eye for things that don’t look right or fixing the problem once you know it exists. In the last post I emphasized the critical importance of layout to backdrop transitions, the difficulty of handling roads that meet said backdrop, and the importance of background structure height and depth.

This week I’m dealing with foreground structure depth.  I’m often asked if there are formula’s or procedures that can be applied to effectively compose a scene.  Unfortunately, a lot of it falls into the “I’ll know it when I see it” category.  In my case it resulted in a case of having the mock ups in place and knowing what I had didn’t look right.  My shelf width was limited to begin with.  I decided to leave a gap between the backdrop and background structure to suggest a cross street.  The three track right of way is a signature element of the LAJ in the part of town I’m modeling.  I decided I needed to add a sliver of 50th street in the foreground.  It’s a lot to squeeze in and I simply ran out of room. Since you aren’t getting a direct view of the sides of the buildings, you can fudge things a little and compress the depth, but there are limits.  The space limitations were such that the depth of the foreground structures was too compressed hence the need for the extension.

The sketch above shows  how things look graphically.  Dimension C was too narrow.  The extra three inches of bench work depth looks much better, it’s done, and now I can move on to the next phase which is creating mock ups to perform the same type of testing with respect to structure width and spacing side to side (left to right).  Over time the only way I’ve found to effectively dial in scene composition is to make heavy use of mock ups for real time visual testing.

The transition from layout to backdrop is dicey even under the best of circumstances.  Moving from a three dimensional flat layout surface to a two dimensional backdrop surface perpendicular to the eye, typically leaves the viewer with the subconscious nagging that “this just isn’t real”.  If we are lucky we model a rural area and can screen the transition with vegetation.  If we model an urban scene….no such luck.  There is no way around the fact that cities have streets and those streets have to intersect with the backdrop.  There are three ways this typically happens as shown in the illustration below.

The through street is the most common.  Unfortunately the laws of physics are such that the layout to backdrop transition for a through street only works for one viewing angle.  Even then you have the near impossible task of matching the street colors of those on the layout and backdrop.  Sure, if you model a narrow two lane road and can tightly control the viewing angle by framing the edges you have a chance.  This is rarely the case though as streets are typically much wider and the urban scene doesn’t lend itself to trees over arcing the pavement.

A dead end situation where the tree stops just short of the backdrop with trees behind is very workable but doesn’t occur often enough that we can use it in every situation.

This leaves the “T” a very workable solution in that we don’t need the road to continue on into the backdrop.  In order for the “T” scenario to work, however, there has to be at least the suggestion of the cross street.  You can’t just butt your structures up tight against the backdrop.

I’m still experimenting with the width of the suggested cross street but the mock up above illustrates a first attempt.  Again, structures butting against the backdrop don’t work unless you can hide the intersection point with vegetation, rarely an option for the urban modeler.  The taller the backdrop structures, the more visually jarring so, if possible, keep them to one story.  Note in the image above that I’ve made the background structure the exact same height as those adjoining it on the layout.  Experimentation showed that having the background structure taller or shorter doesn’t work.  Note also, that I’ve included the sidewalk in front of the background structure to aid in the visual transition.