Self Project: TEMPE LIFE MODEL RAILROAD

Trains were the first thing I ever took interest in, with memories as early as 3 years old. I have lived in AZ my whole life and remember when Valley Metro opened its light rail system in 2008. I grew up in the north valley where rails are non existent.. but now that I live in the heart of the city, I use light rail to commute to class and other daily life activities and errands. With this project, I aim to create an HO scale shelf layout that runs along my walls that represents my daily life here in Tempe, including real world landmarks and scenes from my time here so far!

First, I modeled my room in blender to scale to plan out the construction.

Next, I modeled the bracket on my friend Nicole's Solidworks (I am trained in it but do not own it). I exported it as an .stl into the blender scene.

I scouted out references of each station I wanted to include. I put all of these reference photos in the master zip of this project (If you have any issues opening the apple .heic files, let me know!!). There are 6 light rail stations I included that I use frequently in my day to day life (Smith-Martin/Apache, McClintock/Apache, Dorsey/Apache, University/Rural, Veterans/College, Mill/3rd).

From there, I started to design each station in Adobe Illustrator. I only had so much room so I couldn't make an exact scaled replica of each station, but I was sure to include important key features of each, as well as some scenes from memories I have! These are all included in the master ZIP.

I bought 1/4 inch board that was 2x4 feet for the tracks to lay on, and cut them accordingly.

Like any city, my layout is always changing and developing. In the future, I would like to add:

• Streetcar line

  • UGB building (where my major classes are)

  • Mill Avenue buildings

  • Paseo Del Saber

  • Gammage

• More potential landmarks along light rail