Street car track beginnings

I've started to place some buildings and begin the actual work of railroad building. I began with the urban area and simply used the spur on the left side as the place to begin. I did a lot of experimenting with different configurations, and eventually settled on that shown in the photos.

The street insets in the track are plastic items from Walthers. I bought them sometime ago and used a few to build the urban area surrounding the old Scarboro Square. I salvaged what I could from the old layout and supplemented with the leftovers I had on hand.

I made a few modifications to some building bases in order to get things compactly placed. I cut the parking lot off Scarboro Square Station, and Grille's base was squared up. I wanted all the building bases to be level with the street insets in the track. This meant using 0.080 inch styrene to boost all the bases. This gives a nice level and contiguous surface.

This work is quite interesting, but is progressing slowly since I'm spending a lot of time adding details as I go and thinking and playing with ideas for this and the other parts of the layout.