and then if I need to create a phone number, it's as simple as:
var PhoneNumber = require('../models/phoneNumber');
var phoneNumber = new PhoneNumber();
if I need to use the schema, then PhoneNumber.schema
(which assumes that we are working from the routes folder and need to go 1 level up and then down to models)
EDIT 4
The express wiki has a list of frameworks built on top of it.
Of those, I think Twitter's matador is structured pretty well. We actually used a very similar approach to how they load up parts of the app.
derby.js also looks extremely interesting. It's akin to meteor without all of the hype and actually gives credit where credit is due (notably, node and express).
EDIT 3
If you are a fan of CoffeeScript (I am not) and reeeeaaaaaally want the L&F of Rails, there is also Tower.js.
EDIT 2
If you are familiar with Rails and don't mind the bleed-over of some concepts there is Locomotive. It is a light-weight framework built on Express. It has a very similar structure as RoR and carries over some of the more rudimentary concepts (such as routing).
It's worth checking out even if you don't plan to use it.
Here I load all my models and routes as arrays of files.
Disclaimer:readdirSync is only ok when called before you start the http server (before .listen). Calling synchronious blocking calls at server start time just makes the code more readable (it's basically a hack)
I have my apps build on top of the express-generator tool. You can install it by running npm install express-generator -g and run it using express <APP_NAME>.
To give you a perspective, one of my smaller application's structure looked like this:
One cool thing I like about this structure I end up adopting for any express application I develop is the way the routes are organized. I did not like having to require each route files into the app.js and app.use() each route, especially as the file gets bigger. As such, I found it helpful to group and centralize all my app.use() on a ./routes/index.js file.
In the end, my app.js will look something like this:
I am able to simply require(./users) because I wrote the users route using express.Router() which allows me to "group" multiple routes and then export them at once, with the goal of making the application more modular.
This is an example of what you would fine on my ./routers/users.js route: