Amazingly unusual website about urban design and urban life

Is really about model railroading, and how to appropriately and accurately model buildings, infrastructure, communities, etc., in model railroad layouts.

I was looking for some images of storefronts with awnings for a facade improvement project I am involved in, and lo and behold, I backed into this fascinating website, which turns out to be a great resource for urban design and placemaking, even though ostensibly it is about model railroading in the UK.

The website is Goods & Not So Goods: An overview of railway freight operations for modellers

Appendix One - Outside the Fence has voluminous sections on:

- Roads and road traffic
- Civic and Commercial Life/Public Buildings, Shops, Traders and Tradesmen
- Public and emergency services
- General Information

From the section on Shops and Shopping:

It can be argued that for somewhere to be considered a 'place' in Britain it required four things; a pub (the social hub of the local world), a post office (where you communicate with the government and the wider world), a church (where people contemplate the next world) and at least one shop (required to justify the other three). The shop could be a single 'general stores' type of business selling a range of goods but usually there would be at least two or three shops forming the core of a village. A lot of recently built layouts have plenty of housing but too few shops, although shops offer a range of opportunities for establishing the location and date of a layout.