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| Lines are a bit hard to see - try looking at the large view |
It may seem rather easy to draw up the facades, just get the dimensions and some photos and there you go. The problem is that even in HO scale these would each be a few feet tall and overwhelm the layout.
After some thought I realized I need to establish some sort of vertical scale for the layout which boils down to:
1. The size relationships between the models reflects that of the prototypes even though the models themselves are much smaller than their real life counterparts. This means: the TD Centre , the tallest building on the layout, will be much taller than the Thomson Building, which is much taller than the Canadian Press building, which is taller than A&A, which is on the order of the Imperial Six, which are both in that middling height range that is currently the layout's norm.
2. The proportions of the buildings need to remain close to that of the prototypes even though this may result in fewer floors and narrower frontage than the prototype.
3. My TD Centre mockup is too short at 2' tall, and needs to be taller. It seems ok in N, but not HO. A true-to-scale TD Centre would be around 8' tall in HO, which is about the length of the entire layout! A model in the 3' to 4' range is laughable on its own, but in the context of the other compressed buildings - compressed in accordance with rule 1 - it'll look quite tall while still being short.
As I work on drawings of these buildings I'm struck by the idea that while buildings and street lengths have to be compressed, the streetcars and people are to-scale reproductions. Also, I find that roads and sidewalk widths, as well as building spacing, can't be overly compressed or things start to look too train-set like - over-compression of these negative spaces is always a scene-killer to me. That needs to be its own post: how the size, shape, and use of negative space is one of the most neglected aspects of layout design.
Operationally there are similar restrictions. We compress the mainline distance between towns, but a 40 foot boxcar is still 40 feet. We can compress time with a fast-clock, but yard switching still takes 60 seconds to the minute. This is one of the appeals to traction modeling - very little compression is necessary. But I suppose big city modeling of tall structures in the modern era is one dimension that must still be compressed.
ReplyDeleteNow if you were to model in a shadowbox the buildings could appear to be full-height...
I wonder if the shadowbox effect could be simulated to some degree by raising the layout's street-level up to the viewer's eye-level? When viewed up close this might work, but from a distance, it's the same old thing.
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