I’ve been playing around with brick streets the last couple weeks. All those county-seat towns in the midwest had lots of them.

Years ago I used flexible, probably vacuum-molded brick sheet, cut on the diagonal since that’s the way most brick streets that I knew were laid. Did ok for a while, but my assembly technique wasn’t good and almost all of them came unglued.

Now I’m trying Walthers brick street, which are molded in segments. Each segment includes a curb attachment strip and is wide enough to be half of a two-lane street with parking. The brick is laid transversely, which I think is common in some places so I won’t complain about that. Each segment ends with the same ‘course’, so when you butt two segments together there is no staggering. I could have trimmed one course of brick off from one end, but I decided not to.

Because of selective compression, I need a narrower street width so I’ve scored and broken each segment for the side streets to 1-5/8″ wide, for a width over curbs of 3-1/4″ (just shy of 12 and 24 HO feet). The drop from each segment goes to add to the width of another full segment to model the main street of town, which is on the edge of the module and facing a wall in this case, but it’ll be obviously wider than the side streets. And I need an alley, which can also be made from two of those drops and can have negative crown since alleys were usually built that way.

There are two different moldings for the street segment, one easy to work with and rare, the other one harder to work with and more common in the Walthers packaging. The easy one has two small longitudinal ribs on the underside, the hard one has three transverse ribs which I have to both sever and trim back. Problem is, I think those are the current production.

Speaking of crown, the pieces that Walthers provides for that purpose are 1/16″ thick (6″ HO), which I thought was excessive, especially considering the narrowing I did. I had some .040 x .438 Evergreen strip, which makes the crown look better and I can use a strip as a spine to glue several segments together for easier handling. So Yates Center will very soon look more like a town, especially after I install a few buildings,

I thought I’d built a few buildings here and there over the years, but it was obvious right away that I didn’t have nearly as many already-built ones as I need even for very small small-town scenes. The Yates Center module, for instance, has one full block of downtown buildings, four-ish blocks of brick side streets, and a couple blocks of dirt street and I’ll already run out of buildings that I could just plop down on the layout. I have photos of the actual current appearance of the town, but I’m inclined to think I can find generic brick one- and two-story buildings. There is an elevator on the west end of town that I can modify from two kits, but that may be as far as I’ll go. Eureka will be easier, since the MoPac station was farther out from the center of town and it was mostly industrial buildings that were visible from the station.

(Author’s note: At the Wichita hobby shop, I found a Tichy kit for a steel water tower, which can be built in several ways, but it’s just about a dead ringer for the Yates Center municipal water works tank, which I’m pretty sure was not a MoPac tank despite being within squirting distance from the main line. So there is some good stuff one can find in unlikely places.)

Ron Merrick