Large Scale Central

Thoughts on scaling buildings

Modeling
#1

So I have been thinking pretty heavily on this since changing themes on the RR and deciding to make it building intensive. Any attempt to make buildings historically accurate when it comes to size is rapidly going out the window. I have already started to arbitrarily scale my buildings from the original foot print.

I have chosen to model my buildings in 1:24. The main reason being it is a good catch all size between Standard gauge and 1:20.3. Its also easy to manipulate numbers. So I have just made the choice this is the overall scale. But I still can’t realistically make buildings accurate even to that scale. I simply don’t have the space for them. For example “The Burke” is 60’ long and 40 feet wide and is 28 feet to the peak. At 1:24 that building would be 30" long X 20" inches wide X 14" inches tall. And that really would be a medium size building. I drew up some doors and windows and then proportioned the building around them to something I thought was pleasing to the eye and yet still conveyed the idea. My “Burke” is 20" long, 16" wide and 17" tall. Now I am not far off. I probably could have went ahead and made it correctly especially now that I have actual dimensions thanks to Sandborn maps. So maybe in the future I will just make them the “right” size.

But I am curious how others who are not working to exacting measurements make the calls on how big to make a building if they have a specific building in mind. Or do you? I am just thinking allowed. I will probably continue to operate on the “what looks good to me” method. But I am curious for conversation sake.

2023: The Year in Review
#2

Ah, yes. “Selective compression” is a subject long discussed in model railroading. There are hundreds of articles about it. Basically it’s “select” a few vital things about the building or area you want to model, and “compress” those things into a scene that looks good to the eye, and still would be recognizable.

https://www.google.com/search?q=selective+compression+model+railroading&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS741US741&oq=selective+compression+model+railroading&aqs=chrome..69i57.4621j0j7

#3

I’m sure you know my thoughts…

I’m all for 1:1 size buildings. I’d selective compress but no more than 10%. I’d rather do without than have a small building. I designed my layout for big buildings in mind. Some of them might be false fronts/half of a building. My shack in the staging yard comes to mind. Prototype is 16x 40 so I built it as 8x40.

#4

BD’s answer sounds way more brainy than my I just pick a arbitrary size, my bank has a smaller footprint due to where it will go, the height. I went off the size of the building next to it and just guessed from there. SWAG, Scientific Wild A$$ Guess, to put it mildly.
BUt unless you have acres of room a lot of compression/fudging/ corner cutting to keep thing reasonable is going to have to happen. Unless you are doing a museum piece ala Sutro Tunnel, no one will really notice the fact that things are not exact.
Not the 10foot rule but the masses that ever visit your back yard will never know the building should be X inches/feet bigger, wider ,deeper.
Your RR your rules. Make yourself happy and let everyone else eat cake

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#5

Well Craig I was directly thinking about you when I made this statement :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

#6

Bob,

You pretty well nailed the problem and my solution. I hesitated to even ask other than I was just curious what others do. I certainly did it in HO. And Large Scale in my tiny area is an even larger challenge.

Craig said he would opt for fewer buildings of accurate proportions or lots of “too small buildings”. I am leaning completely the other way. From the photos I have shown the town was wall to wall (literally) buildings. To get the feel of the town it is going to have to have lots of buildings.

Many will be flats or partial flats for sure. The vast majority of the Hecla will be a flat. But many will need to be full buildings sitting side by side to create that busy crowded street scene. So I am very much leaning toward an eyeball approach to selective compression.

#7

FWIW, I’m in the Pete Lassen camp.

The way I think about it is that I’m building scenes that draw my visitors in. Lots of small scenes.

So, the thought process would be like somebody doing a set for a play. What’s important to project the right mood?

I like to think of my buildings (and scenery) as being caricatures. More extreme than real life, to get across a particular feel in the scene. And that is why I am less obsessed with history than many on this site. I need enough history so things look authentic, but then I want to make it larger than life, but in the feel of the thing, not the size.

But, what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for you. My $.02

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#8

maybe since there is wall to wall buildings , just concentrate on the fronts, but selectively compress to get everything in the area you have available, the depth of the buildings as long as the height and width are close will not be noticed. Concentrate in the parts that are actually what people will be looking at. More than my .02 an probably giving Craig heart palpitations with my hereitc talk.

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#9

That’s actually a pretty reasonable approach Pete especially for my particular problem. The main scene I am fretting over is the downtown main street scene. I have one spot on the layout that I am going to dedicate to that scene Making the fronts look “right” and compressing the length would be very reasonable and save me the space I don’t have. In fact I might have to do this just to get them to fit.

Jim,

I fully plan on adopting your above theory. You said what I was trying to say to myself. Am I trying to recreate history. . .No! The railroad is fictitious at least in reality. And while the town existed, I have no intention of making an accurate model of the city. What I want to do is convey the feeling and ideas of these pictures. I am setting up a play, or a scene, and it would ease my mind a bunch to start adopting a more caricature approach. Treating the entire scene as a character in my play.

I love it, and given the space constraint is a great way to approach it.

#10

If your doing more than one piece then selective compression is just something we live with in model railroading no matter the scale.

In doing scenes I try to make the buildings look correct with each other as they would be in the 1 to 1. Not having a service station building twice the size of the 4 story hotel across the street goes a long way towards acceptance by the eye no matter the selective compression.

That’s my hang up in model structures, I think about what this would feel like in the 1to 1 and a model service station that scales up to the 1 to 1 to be 10 foot square just doesn’t feel right.

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#11

I’d argue Devon, you’ve already selectively compressed buildings enough by modeling in 1/24 vs 1/20.3.

Fit as many as you can in your space. I’d have the bookend buildings as full depth and then make the inside ones just false front/roof.

#12

I hate to ask this, but why is 1/20.3 the perfect scale, and 1/24 is not?

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#13

Well in Craig’s defense, 1:20.3 is an exact scale. Our track as represented as 3’ gauge is 1:20.3 scale. So for someone modeling 3’ gauge in an exacting manor would then need to model their buildings at 1:20.3. And the railroad I am modeling is 3’ narrow gauge. So 1:24 scale buildings would be small.

1:24 doesn’t fit at all in Large scale from a purist perspective. 7/8ths is 2’ gauge. as I understand it the 1:22.5 (or whatever LGB is) is European meter gauge. 1:29 is USA trains idea of standard gauge but 1:32 is accurate. Now I might be wrong in this myself since I really am not concerned about it. I initially wanted to be a purist. But now I want to run both 1:20.3 trains and 1:29 trains and have them all look good enough.

I could really make this argument in that in Burke it initially was narrow gauge but then was standardized. And I am modeling it as if it was narrow gauge but will be modeling many of the buildings that came after standardization. So in my fantasy world the whole entire thing is “transition era” and for me 1:24 works as a catch all.

At the end of the day, given my limited space I am fine with fudging. It would be very cool to be able to make my vision come to life in full 1:20.3 both as Fn3 (narrow gauge) and F Standard gauge. But I simply don’t have the space to make both scale and vision come together.

#14

Well, you are basically trying to give an impression of the real thing, so you don’t really need to fully scale the real thing. I did the selective compression thing for my 5 and 10… and I don’t think anyone has ever noticed that it wasn’t full size (though that could be that nobody was familiar with the prototype.)
More here: 5 & 10 cent store

#15

contrary to most here, who first decide a train-scale and then think about buildings and figures, i had a huge colection of 1:32 scale figures and some (about 50) smallish plastic buildings (more like 1:35)
so, when i got LGB-stuff i got two things to solve: how to shrink the trains and how to grow the buildings.
for the trains i found perfect armchair-modeling solutions - to be realized within the next three decades…
with the buildings i went another way. the better ones for backgrounds, the uglier ones as donators for windows and other parts.
do-it-yourself-stoopitt! was the call to arms.
faaar from hobby-shops, being lazy, having no powertools, i had to find “easy” materials.
COFFEE-STIRRERS!!!1!!
the kind, i got here were 120mm / 4.8 inch. (that is about 12 to 13 scale-footish)
a 1:32 figure being about 54mm / 2.2 inch long on average.

so the first “clapboard” fronts that i built were multiples of full or half coffee-stirrers wide.
huts i made about 110 to 120% of a standard person high to the ceiling, while bigger buildings like dancing halls and similar could get up to two persons high.
as i made the first buildings with stirrers glued to cardboard (using simple paper-glue), not many survived my outdoor folly. (open gates, 1:1 hooves and 1:1 rain took a heavy toll)
but my “building code” survived.
all my buildings up till today are built using the same local “standard”. (no matter, what materials i use)

  1. build to accomodate the existing figures.
  2. use believable proportions.
  3. if there are mistakes, build the next three buildings making the same mistake. (then it becomes a feature)
  4. never place two buildings of the exact (storey-)hight side by side.
    (5. visitors will notice, if the trains are too small for the buildings, but not if the trains are too big.)

oh, and my special house rule: never, ever throw away half built or half destroyed buildings. they might come in handy within the next decades.

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#16

Great answers given.
I think it all comes down to doors and windows. These are things that our eyes see and can gauge automatically. If a door is too small or too big we know it, almost feel that something is not right. Of course some doors (building openings) are designed to be large.

Selective compression on our RR’s is so important because few of us have the space to dedicate to a large scale accurate structure.
This years Mik I found a photo of a donut shop and I used my usual approach to scaling it by starting with the door which is at its largest 2x4" and it’s smallest at 1.5x 3.5". I then sketched the build out and it was going to be 16x16 which is huge! I have now scaled it down without dropping the overall theme to a more manageable and more easily placed 12x12 .

On my RR I consider the structures to be second to the trains so they are only complementary to the theme.
It is your RR and if it is good enough for you than that is all you need.

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#17

I model in LGB scale 1:22.5, I’m building a 3’X22’ switching shelf layout and will mostly be structure fronts and very few stand alone buildings for the obvious reasons, no room. My first structure is a 3 story warehouse and I can tell you it gets big right quick, but it does look correct with the freight cars and engines. I will use some 1:20.3 and 1/24th items like autos, etc., but I do pick them with caution looking at how they look with other items. Being a modeler first and a train runner second I really enjoy building in this scale, I don’t seem to find much problem using the scale ruler to get the results I want.
trainman

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#18

Looks VERY nice, John. Well done!

#19

Ahh, unless you happen to model a 3’6" gauge prototype. aka Cape gauge. :grin:

Which is our national gauge in New Zealand. I do like easy math, but I’m not sure about my purity…

Cheers
Neil

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#20

There you go. My American railroad adopted the New Zealand national gauge. Problem solved.