The title should read, "OOO gauge, the smallest of the small". Perhaps I thought I was describing a saw...mill, I don't know. Just a typooo. I'm wondering how many remember this header for an article in the Feb. 1964 issue of Model Railroader? I didn't. I was going through my older rail wig wags and found this article. Start of quote: ""It has been 15 years since a new qauge appeared. You might have thought that the irreducible minimum had been reached with TT, but no a new gauge is taking hold in the model railroad world: OOO or "triple O" gauge. Whether or not OOO is the ultimate in miniatruization, it is hard to conceive of anything smaller for a while. What is OOO? It is a system of standard-gauge models running on a track .355" between railheads, a little narrower than 3/8". Typical models are made 1/160 full size or to a scale of .075" to the foot. Compared to the HO the new gauge is 54 per cent as big, but it looks much smaller than half, since it is smaller in length, width and height."" End of quote. From time to time on this website as well as others the question has come up wondering when and where N scale got it's start. May I suggest N Scale came about when some HO enthusiast said OH "NOOO" Not Something Smaller? And the "N" application stuck. Grin! Also, note how "gauge" was used where today we refer to "scale". Hummm? Pictured in the article is a Lone Star F7 diesel in the C&O paint scheme, and two Arnold Rapido models of a T-3 Prussian State Rys.., and a German Tank Engine. All looking extremely toy-ish. The article goes on to describe some of the equipment available and a number of layouts. Most of the article is centered around the Lone Star and Arnold Rapido products. Feel free to ask about the article and I will try to share what's there. I believe the article is copyrighted meaning I need to be carefull not to reproduce the whole thing. I just thought some of you might be interested.
Rick Your post brings back some memories (as did a book I mention in another thread) Some years ago I was visiting in the Chicago area and stopped in at one of those really old style hobby shops that was basically aout 10 ft wide, stuffed into a large brick building with larger stores on each side, and consisted of a center isle with a row of shelves on each side and had a little stairway at the back that went up to a nearly identical second floor. On the bottom of one of the shelves was a Microtrains box car kit in a rectangular box. I opened the box up and realized that although the pieces didn't look bad, they just somehow looked wrong so I put it back on the shelf without paying the $4.95 price. It wasn't until several years later that I was reading about the original MicroTrains, which was a Swedish product brought out by a one-man shop that offered a nice American style steamer (either 4-6-4 or a 4-8-4, I forget), some rather nice looking passnegers cars that looked astonishingly like the Rivarossi heavyweights and very detailed, and some shake-the-box type freight car kits! He imported his line of products into the US briefly in the early 1950's. I believe the gauge was 10 mm, not 9 but the scale was otherwise almost the same as our modern N. Anyway, the light bulb went on and I realized that I had missed the opportunity to purchase a real N scale collectors item. Unfortunately by then I had absolutely no idea where in Chicago the hobby shop was and although I spent a few hours scouring a street map of Chicago to try to nudge my memory, I could never recall where the that hobby shop was. Anyway, that was my unwitting experience with early N.
Big Snooze and all tuned in, Thanks for the refrence in your post. We must have hit these reminders of good times past at about the same time. I was doing a search for a friend who can't remember the manufacturer for his HO old time passenger cars. They had wooden celestory roofs with a pastic body shell. He has since repainted, installed interiors, windows, a lighting kit and new passenger wheel sets. His cars baffled one of the docents at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum. He thought they were Ambroid. While going through all my 50's and early 60's railroad magazines, looking for the manufacturing source...I came across this article. The first mention I can find of a smaller scale or documentation of such. I wonder what the author would have to say about today's Z Scale? I'm impressed as to how far we have come and yet at the same time how far we haven't come. It's taken most of my adult life to actually see production runs of equipment we wanted back when I was a kid. I mean, desperately enough to attempt to make it, on our own. For some of us it can be extremely difficult to hand craft an item, while for others it's a back yard picnic. I can do some custom paint jobs, detailing with pre-fab detail parts and decaling fairly well. Scratch building...not so good and starting from scratch well...I don't think so. There is still much to be done and new ideas to be tryed. I do believe there is a future for Model Railroading as long as there are youngsters like my grandkids who enjoy grandpa's trains. Thanks for your comeback.
Hi , my son aged 4 still plays with that F7 from lonestar ( in BR paint scheme ) I bought a long time ago . He did put graffitti on it last week , Im going to clean it later , I have one unopened flatcar with two cars on thats going to hang on the wall over my layout . I had a couple of lonestars with track when I was 5 years old , a steam engine and some wagons . we never understod the thing with märklin , and still today I can understand what they are for . http://community.webshots.com/user/TACUTTING Tomas
N is supposedly so called because the rails are Nine millimetres apart. And why scale instead of gauge, well I guess it's because HOn3 runs on N gauge track, but is not N scale, there's a need to differentiate the 2.
TT scale is still around, I guess it just never caught on, no big manufacturers??? TT Scale on the Web
In Britain, the "gauge" terminology is still common. It's HOn30 aka HOn2-1/2 that runs on N track. HOn3 runs on 10.5mm gauge, I believe. HOm (HO metre gauge) used in Europe runs on 12mm track. In its early days, TT mechanisms were often used, but that declined with the decline of TT. In the US, TT was primarily being pushed by HP Products. When they stopped production, it declined. It retained some popularity longer in Germany, where Tillig was the major manufacturer.
I kind of wonder if the demise of TT wasn't partly due to the development of quality N scale by Arnold and others. With TT placed midway between HO and N, there was really wasn't much reason to choose it since TT layout wasn't that much smaller HO. A similar situation happened with S but S did fair better than TT though. I can remember being with my dad as a kid and seeing a TT scale trainset in a department store display. It looked real small next the the HO set. And we thought HO was small since most of us had O-27 stuff. Imagine what we would have thought of Z scale!
And also because "nine" (the gauge in mm) starts with N in most European languages (neun, neuf, nove, neuve, negen, etc). Cheers David
In Britain N is 1/148 but also running on 9mm tracks, so while the track is N gauge the models are not N scale (i.e. 1/160). I stand corrected on the the narrow gauge track terms, here it's 009 anyway (00 running on 9mm track).
I wonder why? Since O is less popular than N, I would more expect an intermediate between the two most popular scales.
In the beginning, there was #2, #1, #0... prit near 100 years ago. Lionel brought out Standard gauge along with #0 (zero or ought gauge). By the time of WWII, O (as it was now called in the US) was King. S (or CD) was post war, as was the rise of HO (really half-ought). 00 (1:72)(double ought or OO) started before WWII, but HO overwhelmed afterwards. TT (Table Top) was in the 50's but never TTook off. N (Nine, etc) came to the US in the late 60's. Z (Zed) wasn't that far behind. An American machinist (Grey??) brought out a line of cars that MT bought the tooling for. These were meant to work with Marklins engines. Historically, the most popular scales have been roughly half the scale of the preceding one: O, HO, N. S, TT & Z are 75% the size of O, HO & N. The next popular scale should be about 1/300... it has been overdue. O = 1:48 (mostly in the US, 7mm/foot scale in Europe) S = 1:64 OO= 1:72 (still used in the UK with HO gauge track) HO= 1:87 (3.5mm/foot scale) TT= 1:120 (1/10" to the foot (US)) N = 1:160 in US and Europe, 1:150 in Japan, 1:148 in UK Z(ed)= 1:220 Bob in IDaho
Question: I seem to recall seeing something about some Japanese N manufacturers not being 1/160. Does anyone know? Tomix maybe?
Funny you should mention that. In one British book from the 70s, I saw a list of many scales that most people have never heard of. One of them was 1/304.8 (1mm/foot), called X.
Technically, the issue with 1:300 is power and coupling. To have a motor and drive train in the loco, with its size and power pickup issues, is unreasonable. It would have to be mechanically driven externally. Air has been used (think foosball/air hockey tables), but probably doesn't have fine enough control. So a drive under the track(??), while leaving a San Fransisco cable car look, would be the best bet. (Yeah, magnetics could work, maybe). For those into the steam era, even the 1830s, could have scale locos quite cheaply. We would abandon DCC, since we would be running the track rather than the locos. The issue of couplers is almost laughable: if we can't get scale couplings in N??? what, other than Brio style magnetics, would work? (can you imagine a coupler 1/4 the size of the car?) Bob in IDaho
