I must say, the N scale people are a freindly bunch. Thanx for those who responded and I truly enjoyed reading all of the respeonse and each person reason for N scale is very interestiing. Like I said we are all model train enthusiats and why not get to know each other, we all have the love of trains in common, why let scale ratio divide that.
OC Engineer JD - your post makes sense, you can run long trains without having that layout that doesn't lok big enough for it.
NorsemanJack; wow it sounds like you had some nice stuff. I also had Lionel 027 when I was a kid. You don't see many S scalers.
Sounds like you have you hands i many train scales. I see you mentioned G scale, do you visit the G scale section? Do you still run any G scale?
I like your signature. I've been a Mopar fan since 1985 and my first car was a 1973 Plymouth Roadrunner with a 340. I also own a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T that is "Real" and numbers match that I bought back in 1990 and a 1998 Dakota R/T 1 of 300 regular cabs built for that year and only 17,000 original miles.
Nice to see that detail for steam trains has come along, that is why Accucraft who is a G scale and Fn3 Scale manufacturer has attracted my attention due to thier detail on steam locomotives.
I have a hard enough time seeing N scale let alone Z scale. Me and another guy at work who is a O and HO scaler sometimes make fun at Z scale stuff such as a dragon fly taking off with a caboose, you can't run Z outside because a ant may derail the train, but all in all the teasing is just in fun.
Everyone seems to talk about moving into smaller homes as to why N scale is popular. Before the housing crash, developers in my state were building big homes around $350,000 and up. Only problem is now we know today no one in reality could afford them.
GATS, That is one awesome layout you have pictures of and it looks so realistic. How long did it take you to make this layout?
Reading through this thread has been really interesting. There are a number of reasons for choosing one scale over another. My main scale is N for a few reasons. First is space. I can have a lot more railroad with N than HO or larger. Also, I really like a lot of real estate for scenery. With N scale a train runs through a large scene rather than a large train running through a small scene. I've built layouts in G, O, HO, N and Z scales and I like N the best. The other scales are fine, especially G, but for me N delivers what I most want. As to why N scalers are the most involved in forums, I don't know. I've noticed that our forum is the busiest by far but don't know why.
Relative Size vs Availabiity of Equipment and Ease of Use HO - is without a doubt the most popular scale. I'm sure it will continue to be for decades, (if it ever does loose it's #1 position). As noted by others the main reasons "appear" to be the availability of equipment combined with the acceptable compromises in relative size. N - I'm sure will continue to make inroads on the HO market for all of the aforementioned, (in other posts), reasons. Why is Trainboard so N centric? Ahh, now, there's the question. One can only guess. Hmm, I'm sure there are "experts" that can do more than that and give numbers to my speculation. In human society any given group lives or dies by achieving a "critical mass". At that point the sum of the parts becomes greater than whole. Some how, some where the N scale forum here reached that critical mass and continued to grow from there. I personally would suggest that it had a lot to do with the interests of a few of the early subscribers who were in N Scale, shared similar personal values and behavioral patterns even though they were separated by 1000s of miles. I speculate that a camaraderie developed and grew. Others that found Trainboard by accident or other means noted the very very friendly atmosphere and remained. They contributed and so it continued to grow. Why N vs others? Because that was the scale they were all involved in. Why? I think I know, but you would have to ask them. Enjoy folks - got to love speculation.
One other reason I love N scale The rolling stock jewel cases fit nicely into my empty cases of beer boxes allowing me to repurpose the boxes. About 200 cars per box of the smaller sized jewel cases.:tb-biggrin: Or is it whan I look at all of my track on my modules, that I have over 3 scale miles to run on.......:tb-biggrin:
I'd love to do it again, I got the room just no layout yet since I moved. It WILL happen again though. I should post some pics of my old first 1bd apartment layout with the train on it, you'd all get a good laugh at that layout. My wife was okay with the 3'x8' thing I had in our livingroom, I wasn't, I needed more. While talking to her one morning on the phone at work I told her "I need more space to run my trains". Yeah, that was a little lie. I was already making more space to run the trains as I built the layout all the way around our 14'x12' livingroom. I also made a nice little branch with a hellava grade too. She's a good woman, all she said was "oh god" and "what will any company think?". I think I might go dig up those pics so you can all have a good laugh.
Sorry, not my layout but the following, in order; pachyderm217 (Todd) spidge (John Paulson) Jim Reising OC Engineer JD (Jerry DeBene)
Thanx for pointing that out, those are nice realistic layouts. You would need a acre of yard to blow those layouts up to G scale
Originally Posted by brakie So curiosity has gotten to me. What makes N scale so popular, is it the size? If it was size you would think HO scale would be the most popular, but it's not if you look at the visit stats to each scale section. I run G scale because I have slight vision problems and could not see N scale properly at close range. --------------------- Metro Red Line. Oh my a "oops!" has slipped in.... What you quote me saying was stated by the OP and not me..
I only had one room size layout in HO but,I never got a chance to finish it because of having to move due to a highway project. Anyway for my size switching layouts N Scale fills the needs far better then HO since I can have more in the same size layout... As far as HO I found out my heart really isn't into it since its club thing with limited operation possibilities.
Another thing about N - particularly in modern operations. HO works well in the steam transition era - where your typical online industry took a single car. HO modelers grew up with that and a lot of layouts run that scenario, the 2-8-0 with six cars and a caboose. Today, you're a lot more likely to see a unit train, an intermodal terminal, or a multiple-car cut going to your online industry. You'll see N scalers doing BIG industries. Even on my layout, over half the switching involves 2, 3, 5 car cuts of similar cars. Not only did LCL die out in the 50's, but today, single car moves are almost as rare. You don't see one-car coal mines, 40' boxcars to a Bachmann-sized tiny industrial plants, and 20 little customers in town. The smallest rail industry in my hometown is probably 2 acres and gets 3-5 cars at a time (covered hoppers, plastic pellets, injection molding). So operations gets way less car-number specific and more 'all the tank cars go to "X", the hoppers go to "Y", etc. N works a whole lot better for that stuff. There's a new Ethanol plant in central PA that brings in 65-car unit trains of corn. And the crews are told NEVER to uncouple the cars or change their order, unless there is a bad-order issue. They have to treat it as one single car movement. Even on the interchange paperwork it is a multiple car cut with a lead and trailing car numbers. Our firm had to design the trackwork, and that included enough headspace for 65 cars in front of and back of the conveyor unloading system - lots of track! We're also doing an ethanol unloading facility and the cars arrive in 8-car blocks, they get broken to 4's, but that's again, typical today. So as modelers tend to model the trains of their youth, N keeps gaining in share for operations. It also means that you see lots of modern, unit-train type cars, not that much steam era, etc. Your typical N scaler needs 20 of this and 10 of that. Another tendency we see is that coal trains are increasingly flood or loader-processed under power and head right back out. You don't even break the air. Empty train comes in, crew changes to a 'local' crew that creeps it forward for loading, next day the loaded train (with the power it came in with) heads back out. Sometimes power on both ends and it just reverses.
