Conrail Windsor St Yard (York PA) Engineering Report

[Cajonpassfan]

Ed, I really feel your pain, and could add quite a few bullet points of my own to your list, but yea, you got it. Building actual urban places, rather than generic towns, requires a ridiculous amount of work. But backdrops can be your friend my friend. Putting the more recognizable, iconic structures on the backdrop, and building the more everyday, generic, kitbashed structures intermingled with a few key scratchbuilt buildings like a depot of whatever is the character-giving feature of your town, can go a long way toward conveying a sense of place and time.
Enjoying your progress to date...
Otto K.

[wm3798]

Pump the brakes, there Hombre.  You have to get over the whole prototype fidelity thing, or you'll drive yourself mad.

First, you have to decide which iconic buildings define the area you are representing, then make some accounting of where they will fit into your design.  Figure out which ones will need to be bashed from available kits or modular systems, and which ones need to be scratched out.  Then stop bitching about them, and build them.


Yeah.  Sometimes it takes 10 years and contributions from everyone else on the Railwire, but iconic buildings are ALWAYS worth the effort.

Second, you have to get off the "Flat as a pancake" city scape.  I know, you're following the flood plane of Codorus Creek, but the town still has some profile to it.  Plus, goddamit, you're building a theater set for your actors (the trains) to run through.  You're not building an architects model for the York Renewal Association.  You need some vertical elevation, even if it's just a little, to create a feeling of a natural terrain.  It will also very cleverly give you some opportunities for visual trickery.


Just the slight rise from right to left, and from front to back provides enough character to give the scene a bit of visual interest.  If you ran a ridge down the center of the peninsula, no more than an inch of elevation on average, a little more here, a little less there, and it will look a million times better, especially in low angle photos.

Third, you have to get away from the parallel/perpendicular to the table top trap.  Your track work is already following this unnatural boundary too rigidly, but your street grid doesn't have to.  And I don't care if you think the prototype doesn't work this way.  You have to remember Ed's Law.  Somewhere in town, there's a 30 degree crossing, so that gives you license to, dare I say it, disrupt the status quo.



Fourth, don't be afraid of DPM.  They will make for outstanding "cereal filler" for your scene.  Consider each kit comes with a front, a back, and two sides.  Using smoke and mirrors, and a few sheets of cheap styrene, that means each kit can become four different buildings, each viewed from a different angle.  You can also get some odds and ends from other kits and scratch/bash together some facades that can be squished between two DPMs or Walthers kits, and create a row of three buildings while only paying for two.


In the upper left of the image, there are two old Heljan store fronts, separated by a white clapboard "false front" done this way.  I used the unused windows and store front from the Heljan kit to give the block some continuity.

They're also very easily adapted to a "customized" facade...



Fifth, once you have a street grid laid out that follows the principles of two and three above, you can think about structures not in terms of individual buildings, but rather as the blocks of the grid.  Now you have 6 or 8 block projects to work on, not 48 individual projects to think about.  Much easier on the brains.  Likewise, you can engage yourself detailing a single block with trash cans, winos, hookers and dogs peeing on fire plugs, instead of feeling overwhelmed thinking about detailing an entire city.  You'll never move off of square one with that kind of to-do list!



So yes, rethink your plan, but the main thing you need to do is rethink your thinking!

Now get to work.

Lee

[nuno81291]

I think as far as the road by the freight house it could work but I would go for an alleyway sort of vibe with a gritty rough condition road with cracks/gravel dirt etc... your proto photo underneath didn’t load for me so I am just thinking east coast tight quarters industrial settings I am familiar with.

As far as the time it takes, it looks like in your last large photo of the area you have a number of structures in various states of completion.., could we get an overall photo of the area with how much progress you have? Compression can be a necessary evil. Perhaps making some good printed or card stock stand ins for the time being can help you get the lay of the land better. It seems you are well underway but as far as the sidewalk joints or sight lines etc I think referring to a prototype is great but if you need lots of compression feeling it out with the minds eye and pulling what works from the area can help the compression result in a satisfying scene; even Lance Mindheim is “guilty” of this in some of his projects. The other thing I don’t think has been touched upon is the ultimate satisfaction that you get from making a one of a kind non-DPM town. I need to go back through this thread but it would be good to see more proto or birds eye (RIP Bing) photos that coincide with wherever is bumming you out

[wm3798]

I think it's also important to remember that just like a real city, it's okay to tear down a building that's not making you happy and replace it with one that's better.

As I overheard many a dad say to many a son in the narrow aisles of Klein's on Gay St., "Rome wasn't built in a day..."

[DKS]

1. It's unforgiving. Unlike the country, where you can just throw down miles of trees and brush, every square inch has to "make sense".
2. It's labor intensive. I can make a blocks worth of trees in an evening, but a block of buildings takes lots of work (and expense).
3. In order to do it well, you need a lot of stuff and a lot of variety. The selection of urban style buildings for towns like York aren't great, and what's available has typically been "done to death". I could just go buy one of everything from DPM, but then York will look like "DPM Town" and that's just not gonna do it for me. The solution, then, is scratch building and kitbashing, but that takes even more time and effort.
4. This is somewhat unique to my own situation, but, the geometry of what I've got planned makes precision important. Since each cross road connects with each side of the penninsula, and the one stretch is very visible street running, I don't have a lot of wiggle room. For example, I have to get the angle of the sidewalk joint perfect on one side, otherwise the other end of it won't end up in the right place with regards to the start of the street running.

Maybe I've just got my standards set too high, but at least, for now, I'm just going to keep plowing ahead.

Oh. Poor baby has to do some modeling. 

I'm with Mr. Salty on this one; Lee tells it like it is. Especially with respect to choosing a few iconic buildings (as opposed to slavishly modeling any large scenes with fidelity--that's not practical), as well as making changes. You won't get it right the first time, but don't let that stop you from trying again.

And if that's still not working, then maybe think about modeling something else, or relegate the urban scenes to a backdrop, and use the foreground for negative space (which we all know you're good at--seriously).
 
 

[wazzou]

Ed's a scenery guy, not a building and facilities guy.
We all have our limitations or strengths and as long as I've been here, this is the way it's been from what I have seen.
Not criticism, just things that can't go unnoticed.

[OldEastRR]

;sadlfsalkdfpdosasdoaskljansa

[OldEastRR]

Urban scenery is hard -- you can work a whole evening spreading grass and planting trees and cover a couple of feet. And spend the same amount of time assembling a building with a 3"x2.5" footprint. Does feel frustrating.
Tho you can't build a whole urban area in a few days, you can spend that time roughly planning where streets are, what buildings go where, which sections will be residential or town center or industry. Then DEFINITELY lay out the streets to define and place these areas. Yes, a grid, and yes, don't make the roads parallel to the layout edge. Mark the road edges. Use the same distance between streets when laying out the "blocks", which should be mostly the same size. But remember sometimes buildings or complex RR track gets in the way and there's no street through that area -- tho it may lead up to and head away from it in a straight line. And generally all buildings should align to the grid.
You may already be way past this point and have all your city blocks defined. Once you've got that, cut styrene sheets to fit each block and build your urban areas on those -- one block at a time, done conveniently at the workbench instead of hunched over the layout.  Before you build any structures, scribe the sidewalks, leave spaces for alleys, sidings, foundations of torn-down buildings, parking lots, etc  and gangways, if any. Then select and place structures within the space left over.The styrene "block" will fill up fast even one small building at a time, causing less frustration at the pace. Any large structures or industries may have the entire block or 2 to themselves. Once you've got one block done, set it in place and work on another.
You should research other's results and experiment at making kits not look like kits. An easy job is building a block façade out of 2 or 3 of the same DPM building kit. Cut the ends off where the kit fronts butt up against each other to make it look like one long similar structure. Then splice the rear walls together and assemble the four walls. You'll even end up with spare walls for something else.
Another idea is to mix in some of the many laser-cut wood kits among DPM brick ones. Many old sections of towns still have wooden retail structures, just with modernized fronts.

But making exact replicas of prototype structures is a very difficult and tedious task. Not only do you need to be very skilled in fabricating all kinds of building parts but you'll probably need to modify any stock building parts (and there aren't many in N scale) to make it look like what you need. And if you don't have the plans it's a real pain. Working from old photographs just isn't the same.
You might have followed jdcolombo's thread on the National Carbon Company factory I'm building for him.

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Looks really good and is a faithful replication (tho selectively compressed) of the plant as it was in 1955. But I've been working at it since June 2016 and now will finish it by the end of this year (one more major building is missing from that shot). The time used was the same amount of time anybody would usually devote to model railroading over the same period, but it was a lot of hours.
This was an extremely complicated and involved structure which I doubt would be like anything you need to copy, but making prototypical models takes much more time and research than building or kitbashing store-bought ones. However, as Lee says, if you have one or two iconic buildings that must be included in your scene then be prepared for a lot of work. The end result, tho, is excellent. 

[MVW]

... hookers and dogs peeing on fire plugs ...

Marking their territory? 

Jim

[Ed Kapuscinski]

One other thing I've forgotten to mention.
I'm working against a self imposed deadline. We're looking to move sometime this year, and I want the thing "article ready" by the time it has to come down.

And yep, @OldEastRR , that's exactly what I'm talking about. That's a beautiful facility but the timeline gives me chills.

Maybe sometimes I'm more millennial than I think or want to let on.

However... this week finally promises to be a bit slow work wise, so I'm planning a big push. Fire up the preparatory bombardment!

[MK]

One other thing I've forgotten to mention.
I'm working against a self imposed deadline. We're looking to move sometime this year, and I want the thing "article ready" by the time it has to come down.

Not too many days left this year!!!   

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Not too many days left this year!!!   

Haha, well, I meant "within a year".

[wm3798]

There's some nice places in Hampton Gardens... long ranchers with big basements...  Just sayin'...

[DeltaBravo]

Several folks in my neighborhood are planning to downsize next year. Plenty of backyard to let the dogs run.    Bantrak / TRW member within walking distance. Could be good!

[wm3798]

So work on one block for the photo shoot.  What's so hard about that?





Lee