European road question

oddmanrush

I've heard of, though never attempted, people using freeze dried split peas for cobblestones. Just seal 'em and place them in plaster, or celluclay or whatever other material you're using for your base.

There was a diorama in FSM a few issues back in which the author used those, looked pretty good... After he embebded them in the ground material and they were set, he sanded them smooth... I bought a bag of split peas to give it a try, but that build is still well down the pipeline...

teejay

Hans von Hammer:

LOL @ Manny..

Depends on what kind of road you wanna do... Streets are gonna need sidewalks, curbs, and possibly sewer drains...

What'd ya have in mind?

 

Either asphalt like you mentioned or cobblestone. It'll be great if there's a thin sheet of cobblestone like texture that I can just cut using xacto to any size I want.

Check your LHS in the model railroad section... Evergreen makes several scales of "brick" vac-formed styrene sheets that'll work for cobblestones... 

I think you could take advantage of this; it is a very old cycling race from Paris to Roubaix which is a big city in the north of France ( the oldest cycling race is Liège-Bastogne -Liège roughly in the same region but I couldn't get as good pictures as those from Paris-Roubaix. In this case, cobblestones have been maintained for ...artistic expression as there are not everywhere in the country now. I am 53 and when I came to Lyon from Algeria in the 60's I think there were currently cobblestones in some streets but there were swapped for asphalt cover as a sign of the times. Hope it will help you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris%E2%80%93Roubaix

Hans von Hammer

LOL @ Manny..

Depends on what kind of road you wanna do... Streets are gonna need sidewalks, curbs, and possibly sewer drains...

What'd ya have in mind?

Either asphalt like you mentioned or cobblestone. It'll be great if there's a thin sheet of cobblestone like texture that I can just cut using xacto to any size I want.

I've heard of, though never attempted, people using freeze dried split peas for cobblestones. Just seal 'em and place them in plaster, or celluclay or whatever other material you're using for your base.

Manstein's revenge

Miniature cobblestones.........

aquarium pebbles?

LOL @ Manny..

Depends on what kind of road you wanna do... Streets are gonna need sidewalks, curbs, and possibly sewer drains...

What'd ya have in mind?

Miniature cobblestones.........

Thanks. By the way are you familiar on what materials should I use to create the urban road for the diorama?

Asphalt and asphalt concrete was used on European roads as early as the 1870s... Streets were largely cobblestone and brick, although macadam, and cobblestone roads were prevailent as well... In the larger cities though, there were a number of streets that were asphalt concrete, especially those built in the 1920s & 30s, and the outlying areas and smaller towns still having a brick or macadam roadsurface. Most generally, road construction prior to WW2 in France was of a granular-type, crushed rock over an asphalt binder, similar to what is used on secondary roads in the US today.  In Germany, many sections of the Autobahn were concrete that was reinforced to be used as runways for the Luftwaffe.  

So basically, just about any road surface you can find in the US was found in Europe...  I remember a number of places that still had cobblestone and brick surfaces as late as the 1960s in dowtown areas..