Techniques to build a tabletown

[DJ Force]

I am about to start building my first tabletown and have some questions for that matter.

How do you all plan your layouts and how do you execute it?

Are you just buying lots and lots of roadplates and put your buildings next to them? Or do you use brickbuild roads? How would you combine sets like Green Grocer, Cafe Corner and Market Street with roads? Both sets and roads offer studs for a pavement, but using both makes a far too big pavement, wouldn

Edited January 16, 2009 by DJ Force

[Ralph_S]

I don't actually have any roads with my collection of Cafe-corner compatible buildings, as you can see,

I don't have a permanent layout. In this case they were temporarily set-up on my kitchen table. I have given a bit of thought to the scale of the vehicles if you want to combine them with pedestrians and buildings. When I built my first cafe-corner compatible building, I also built two cars: a Ferrari and a taxi, both visible in this picture. I chose to make them five studs wide. They go well with the buildings and also with LEGO's current range of city trucks that are technically 7 studs wide albeit with 6-wide cabs. Cars and trucks that come in most current sets are nicely proportioned and I prefer them over the older 4-wide vehicles.

For public displays with the Brickish association we combine our buildings with brick-built roads built by Doug Idle)

It looks a lot better than standard roadplates, but indeed uses a lot of parts. That said, I think it's worth it.

You can see it here when displayed at an event in October last year. I supplied most of the vehicles for this layout and for this too my trucks were 7-wide and cars 5.

BTW, LEGO standard roadplates/baseplates might be thinner than normal plates, but if they rest on top of studs, they're about as thick as a plate. No problems there.

Cheers,

Ralph

[Joebot]

BTW, LEGO standard roadplates/baseplates might be thinner than normal plates, but if they rest on top of studs, they're about as thick as a plate. No problems there.

Indeed, I just recently discovered this fact, and it's been VERY useful!!

In my town I have two raised sections (built with plywood, supported by wooden two-by-fours, then surrounded with Lego landscaping). You can see one of the sections here. I intially had an all-Lego solution, but geez, that took up a LOT of bricks. And it was kinda flimsy when you tried to push down on the raised baseplate. The plywood solution is just a whole lot cheaper, simpler, and sturdier.

I've always used roadplates rather than brick-built roads. My problem is that my collection spans 30 years, and over the years, Lego has seen fit to change their roadplates probably 6 or 7 times. I've tried to isolate the green roads from the grey roads, but even within the different colors, the roads are different widths.

Personally, I love the classic 4-wide cars, but I guess I'm just old fashioned. 6-wide appears to be the wave of the future.

[DJ Force]

Thanks a lot. That´s helping me out quite a bit already.

So, how wide were those brickbuild roads in studs? And most important: How did you manage to get so many dark bley bricks without going bankrupt

[Johnnhiszippy3]

I just began working on a post-"dark ages" layout and began to buy roadplates, but then changed my mind and am now working on brick-built roads. The deciding factor for me was that I wanted to include a trolly or light-rail train in the middle of my road - something that would look pretty bad with baseplates. Some other advantages of brick-built roads that I've found are:

- You can build in lenghts other than 32-studs long

- The road width can be whatever you want (even two lanes in one direction or a turn lane!)

- You don't get a crosswalk at every segment

- You can make the road black with yellow stripes (or whatever color you want)

- It's easier to build the road up, giving neighboring buildings basements or partial basements

- You won't end up with lots of wasted cross-pieces

- It looks a lot better!

- As Joebot mentions, Lego does change their plate designs from time to time, so plates can look weird when combined.

The one big dissadvantage: cost (also, it's hard to make curves look good)

[DJ Force]

So... has anyone ever build a curve that´s looking good?

[Ralph_S]

Thanks a lot. That´s helping me out quite a bit already.

So, how wide were those brickbuild roads in studs? And most important: How did you manage to get so many dark bley bricks without going bankrupt

I didn't actually build the roads, but looking at them I'd say they're a bit wider than the roads you'd normally find on LEGO roadplates. Their overall width is probably not a lot less than 32 studs. Quite where Doug got the bricks for them I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if his shopping would have single-handedly increased the price on dark bley brick on bricklink in the UK.

As Johnnhiszippy3 mentions, brick built roads look much nicer than roadplates. Of course, it's a pretty expensive way to build your town, but as a general principle, I'd say it's better to have a small city with nice roads and decent buildings than a large one that is little more than a combination of built up sets.

Cheers,

Ralph

[Peppermint_M]

Printed paper layouts. I have (an aborted until such a time as I have space) plan for a table town which included an A0 printed road grid. Ok, so I does look sort of playmat, but if you combine a roadway print with a brickbuilt road (useing filler instead of bley and covering with the paper printed road designs) instead of using a playmat road layout or bankrupting amounts of bley. You can extend it in A4 chunks and it wouldn't really look like a playmat.

[DJ Force]

Okay, now a difficult one.

I´m planning to have buildings on both sides of my streets and a sewer grill next to the pavement. Both sides should be mirrored. AND the whole street should be modular, so I can extend it as I like as my city grows.

I came to think that having 1x10 bricks in dark bley and tilting them 90 degrees should do for the cheapest way to build a road and implementing sewers and so on. But I´m puzzled as to the modular system. Any ideas?

[brickzone]

I think you could have *both* the modular building pavement *and* the pavement of the road plate combined. Many European cities have broad pavements, and quite progressively favour pedestrians rather than cars. Indeed even here in Ireland, some main streets that have not been pedestrianised, have nevertheless been made "pedestrian-friendly" - i.e. the vehicular traffic constrained to one or two lanes (usually one-way) and the extra road space taken up by new footpath paving.

So I think using the recent road plates, just placed in front of the modular buildings, you could acheive this effect if you extended the tiled pavement across the edges of the road plates. Of course it will look bare unless you add realistic street furniture - trees, bins, seats, light standards. And of course fill them with people.

[DJ Force]

You speak true words

The problem is, that the lanes of the current roadplates are pretty narrow. Especially when I´m planning to use 6 stud wide cars and at least 8 stud wide trucks. That´s why I´m trying to find a solution for brickbuild roads that suits my needs perfectly.