I promised an update so here is the work I've completed so far.
Interestingly I find I'm using the blog posting process to overcome any procrastination to force myself to make progress on this module.

Knowing that the area I wanted to recreate would fit on a T-Trak module I thought the best place to start would be with the roads and pavements. The Stadtbahn itself runs right across the middle of the board and laying the roads/pavements would help me make a more accurate guess at the span of the bridge that is the centrepiece of the module; I'd also have a much better idea how much space I'd have available for buildings.

I know that an N scale T-Trak module represents a real-World area of about 50m x 57m. Using the scale built into the maps and images of the Universitätsstraße area I drew a box this size over the area I wanted to model. This locks in the area I'm modelling and gives me edges to measure from. Using the same ratios, I then calculated the width of the roads and pavements.

First I figured out the width of the pavements in various parts of the scene and cut these from white styrene. I debated for a little while whether I should try and replicate the various pavement surfaces (cobbles/square paving/diamond paving) by scribing the surface of the plastic but I think whatever I attempt might look over-scale. Perhaps I'll come back to this later.

I then figured the width of the roads. I decided to use grey card (the kind you find on the back of pads of paper) for the road surface. It's not completely smooth (that didn't look quite right) and has just enough surface texture without looking over-scale. I'm hoping the lip created by laying the pavements on top of the road will allow the buildings to sit behind/inside the lip help hide any gaps that might be present at the bottom of the buildings.

Here's a picture of the first card roads:

As you can see I hadn't quite finished laying all the road and my excitement at the progress and how it was already looking made me jump ahead to the next stage, the tram tracks.

A tram track runs parallel with the Stadtbahn across the centre of the scene. I debated for a while whether I should try and use Kato TramTrak or even scratchbuild some tracks but decided this might give me reason to put the project on hold so went for the option of creating non-working tram tracks instead. If I made them correctly there was no reason why a static model couldn't sit on the tracks later.

I calculated where the outer tram tracks ran in relation to the edge of the road and cut the surface of the road in half at this point. I then removed 9mm from the edge of the inner piece of road. I used 0.5mm x 0.5mm styrene strip to represent the rails and 0.25mm x 0.75mm styrene strip to represent the inner 'check rails'?

I glued the roads and rails down with tacky PVA glue. being careful to maintain a consistent gap between the rails and 'check rails'.

I might add a second piece of styrene to the rails to make them a bit higher as they are currently slightly below the surface of the road.

I haven't yet glued down the pavements but here's a final shot of the scene as it stands now from the kind of perspective I hope the module will be viewed from:

Next steps, finish laying the road and glue everything down.

In the meantime I've also started drawing plans for the first building:

Until next time.

Simon