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Roads vary by design. Country lanes might be 10' wide, perhaps 12', while a major two lane highway might be 30'. Same for buildings. Modern middle class homes might have a footprint of 10' X 80' and rise three levels in some urban situations (yup, a tight squeeze!), while others are your "standard 25'X30' two-level.
Why not do what many modellers do; find a few really nice and typical homes and measure them? Seek permission from the owners and pace off or measure their foundations and heights to the extent possible. Then convert to inches and divide by 87.
If it'll help, a Walthers built-up house measures 3.5"x3.5" plus a front porch. It's a two-level with peaked roof, so it comes to 5" high at the apex of the roof.
Hi, Roger,
I'm pretty new to HO RR ( I was active MANY years ago and then family and jobs took priority) and really enjoy/appreciate the Internet as I get back into it.
One of the ways I get sizes for scratch building is visiting the manufacturers of the structure kits and read their foot print for different buildings. Real estate on my layout is expensive (just a small layout) and therefore the buildings must be small. I've found that reducing the footprint by as much as 25-30% is not too noticeable. A 1440 sq ft house would scale to over 27 sq inches (3.3" x 8.3"). That is a pretty big footprint, without the lot. This house might be reduced to 2.5 x 5.5/6" and not be noticed. I'm modeling the early 1900's - buildings/houses seem to be more compact.
One of the scratch built prototypes from 30 years ago (its been packed away) is big - having a hard time finding a place to use it.
This is my first posting - just joined today. Been reading for a short time.
This forum seems to have a lot of down-to-earth modelers. I look forward to visiting often.
Hi, Jon, and welcome aboard. That's some good advice you've given. Just measuring the prototype building and reproducing it in scale will eat up most layout space in a flash. Residential structures are a good place for selective compression because the house only has to "look" right. Houses, especially if they are two story, can be very narrow and tall and still have the look of a bigger house. I have six houses in my residential neighborhood and the "mansion" scales out to about 800 actual square feet...but it still looks way bigger because it's tall and I have a lot of trees and foliage disguising the fact that house isn't very deep. I too have a structure from a layout I built more like 35 years ago now and have no place to put it because it's scaled to a real prototype and it's just too darned big. I had a much larger layout then so it fit but now my layout is smaller and those giants of yesteryear just don't have a place to sit.
I did a Google search a few years back to get an idea on road dimensions. Came up with some PDF files for various communities/counties that had specific dimensions regarding street widths, lane widths, where the lines go, what angles to paint the parking lines, etc.
That site disappeared, though I know I have the file somewhere. But, I'd think there'd be more.
On a different note, there is one street I wanted to put on my current layout that is based on a real street I've been to a number of times. So, I had a friend of mine go out there and measure it for me! Nothing fancy, just enough for an idea. Which he did, since he goes out that way regularly.
I found it. FairhopeSubdivisionStreetDimensions.pdf. Can't remember how I found it on Google, as I said, that site disappeared. You might try to Google the document name to see if it shows up somewhere.
