Brick built roads

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No more baseplates

When I heard that LEGO® stopped building street-baseplate, I was looking for an equivalent replacement. Unfortunately I did not found anything which meets my expenses. So I thought of designing them on my own.

This was not a simple task: Where should I start? What should I use as a reference?

Defining a new design

A little searching finally brought me to the MILS and L-Gauge pages where I found the MultiRoad: Modular Road System for MILS which I used as a base for my ideas.

First I thought of requirements that my design must fulfill (in order of importance):
  1. Must be possible to build with bricks/plates (at least at module borders)
  2. Compatible with MILS (in regard of street width)
  3. Universal design (usable for right-hand and left-hand traffic)
And a list of nice-to-have ideas (with no special order):

An additional idea is the street gutter which I really miss on all alternate street base plates. But I am uncertain about the design of it. In the examples I used the wall brick design, but I think in future improvements it might be simple unicolor.

With all these ideas in my head I started building some mockups and created a small program to create some designs on different baseplates.

Examples

These examples only show junctions because these have a lot of features in one plate (straight part, corner and optional crosswalk).

In town roads

Narrow junction

Narrow junction

A simple narrow junction with street gutter and a crosswalk.

Wide junction

Wide junction

A simple junction with street gutter and a crosswalk.

Wide junction with bike lanes

Wide junction with bike lanes

This junction with street gutter also has bike lanes. I think this is too much, but I just wanted to see anything on a plate.

Wide junction - simple design

Wide junction - simple design

An alternate and simpler design of a junction with a bending main road.

Out of town roads

Wide junction

Wide junction

The out of town design uses a larger radius (and also another design of the baseplate itself). This is completely compatible with the simple in town design.

More to follow...

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