theboyk

Thanks everyone—that's been a great help!

zephyr, That's pretty much the plan. Using four of the XL grey baseplates for the city portion and two greens for the grassy area. Then the rest is going to be paint (roads) and some old, cheap model train style hackery/work for the dirt road (dyed sawdust & watered-down carpenter's glue), which I'll be mounting the rails along, and a small lake (a combo of paint and liquid glass). That way, we can save the money for the fun stuff (the LEGO). 8) And as for the train. Yea, on this go, we're keeping it simple and just a straight, unpowered line (well, aside from push-power, that is). Like I said, we're just keeping it simple. Just one, small table (at least, that's what we've told my wife <G>). Thanks for the advice! This is going to be fun! k.

Thanks! Much appreciated!

Hello! My daughter and are I planning our first Lego City. We have a 84 x 122 cm table and I'm looking at purchasing some baseplates and rail track. We'll also be making custom "roads". This is, in the grand scheme of things, a "small & simple" project, but for us, planning is part of the fun. I've been going through the forums and have been trying to put together the info we need to get the planning underway, but I'm having a hard time understanding how to "measure" things out and I'm hoping for a little help. Just to get an idea of what we're doing, the road is going to split the city through the middle (from left to right) and the rail track is going to split the city perpendicular to the road (from top to bottom) with a rail crossing in the centre of the city. Both the road and the rail track are super simple (just straight from left/right and up/down)—nothing fancy. Anyway, so I'm just trying to get a basic idea of what typical measurements are for things. What I'm looking for, more specifically, is… 1. What's the width of a current (?) rail track? Or, how much space should you allow for (in terms of width) when laying track between two objects to allow for both the track itself and the trains (as we're thinking of putting the rail track between two baseplates versus bumping the baseplates flush together and putting the rail track on the baseplates). 2. Is there an average size of a LEGO car/truck/vehicle? For example, if we were planning a two-lane road (one lane in each direction), how wide should the road be (again, we're thinking of custom-building, via paint on the table, the road between the base plates)? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Kristin.