Real life modeling - check out the local planning site

It's amazing what you can find on the local planning department website of your council. Especially if you are modelling real life places. Council's have planning application sites, where all sorts of things are listed. Each planning application can have loads of documents on them which are generally in either Word or PDF format. You can search the planning applications and these will go back a few years and discover original drawings sometimes before the building for example, was altered. These are done by Architects so are often to scale and detailed enough to work too. One thing you have to remember is to get the right planning department. For example places with a postcode that makes you think it's in the main town or city department, can actually be covered by another cross the border authority. The documents are all free to download. Generally you do not have to log on to get them.

You might find for example the plans and pictures of an old station building before it was converted to the house. Even the plans for the new house and showing what was there before. Sometimes plans are refused, but the documents might be still available. So even if you see a run down building, someone might have applied for planning to turn it into something and submitted drawings and plans of it as it stands.
I have posted a couples of examples I pulled off Sheffield Council's site showing an LNER shed and a local Bank, next to a station entrance I am modelling.