80' High Trees?

You touched on one of my biggest pet peeves in model railroading. Very few people model tress of scale size. It really bugs me.

Ditto

 The AGHR layout has a good many 40 to 80' and bigger pines trees on the layout. check out their web site.

http://www.angelsgatehirailers.org/ 

Most layouts use selective compression to some degree, and that works with trees also. If we were going to be absolute sticklers for perfect scale, we would need O-gauge track curve radii of more than 10 foot radius to represent minimum mainline standards.

Trees of true scale height will make other things on a typical layout look overly small. Selective compression helps keep things in reasonable proportion to each other.

True, but growing up in the Northeast I see towering oaks daily.  I wouldn't want to make a 6" high, four story building either.  

I tend to put my taller trees closer to me and smaller trees farther away. Like I said before, large curves and tall trees matter.

We're still bouncing around how/where to build a couple of 300-foot Giant Redwoods.

Great.  I would head to the local Garden Center and get a 4 foot tree. Ha.

I model the Oklahoma/Texas panhandles.  Here's a picture of the first tree planted in the Texas panhandle  near Panhandle, Texas.  Well this is a picture of the replacement tree, it was planted in 1969.   Note the size of the tree and the fence, and signs about the tree. All you need a one tree between towns that you model or one tree per 10 square miles modeled.  P.S. the next tree south of this tree is approx. 40 miles away.  Sorry, I looked at google earth and I think I found a tree approx. 23 miles south at a farm house.

Yeow!  I hope you have lots fire hydrants for the k9s!

You've all brought up some interesting decision points. I agree that really big trees could create operational problems. We are, first and foremost, model train runners if you have a layout. Anything that blocks vision invites disaster since Murphy always causes things to happen at the worst possible moment, in the worst possible places. I was originally going to have my town go over top of the trackage. Then I realized that some critical switches are in that area and vision blocks were the last thing I needed.

RichO posted:

True, but growing up in the Northeast I see towering oaks daily.  I wouldn't want to make a 6" high, four story building either.  

Perhaps that's my problem. Born and raised in NE Ohio I've been surrounded by lots of big trees my whole life. Looking out into my back yard and there are many varieties of coniferous and deciduous trees that range from 25ft-80+ft tall. Even compressed a bit will still yield a big model tree. Little trees just stick out like a sore thumb to me.

clem k posted:

I tend to put my taller trees closer to me and smaller trees farther away. Like I said before, large curves and tall trees matter.

Clem ,wow an impressive layout, nicely done, not to hi jack this thread but what's the size of your layout? Great looking trees too!