Modeling Calamity Finished...for now

Here is my more or less completed model of Calamity. The boards are finished, the buildings are finished and ultimately that's what I wanted to accomplish with this, something that would allow me to shuffle buildings around and get a better feel for different arrangements will work. The idea is to keep it simple and avoid working in detail that's not necessary to picking an arrangement. I'm not certain that this will be the final version of the model itself as I will probably mess around with some other road arrangements as well which will require the construction of additional boards.

One idea that has been put forward is to have all the roads running at angles on the board, not parallel to the edges like the current board is setup. This is a highly desirable characteristic to work into model railroads to better help establish the illusion of stepping into another world. I have messed around with this concept a bit today on paper, but it tends to actually cut down on the amount of useful space available for the buildings themselves. It leaves some interesting areas that could be modeled into useful terrain features but I would be sacrificing the space for 4 or 5 buildings in order to do this. I'll continue to play around with this concept, and some others, before I final put saw to wood and start construction.

Here are some photos from today's work.

The completed boards

This is the center section featuring the stream. Its not very deep in the mockup but the intent is to have it deep with fast moving water.

The east board

The west board

Bringing it all together

Some different arrangements, it only takes seconds!

This one is in violation of the 2" rule. No building should extend to the 2" zone all around the board edge.

Apparently I keep violating my own rule

Some street views