The forerunners of H0/00 gauge

[sncf231e]

BING of Germany introduced his Tischbahn (Table Railway) in 1922; this had a gauge of 16 mm. Four years later JEP of France introduced his Pacific-Mignon trains with the same gauge. This afternoon I played with this trains and made a video to show the difference and similarity:

 

Regards

Fred

[Paul H Vigor]

I have a c.1923 Bing Table Railway electric locomotive. It came from a vintage toy shop in Shropshire. It comprises a scratch-built, replacement, tinplate body on the original Bing chassis. It runs surprisingly well for a 98 year old!

[Il Grifone]

Lovely!

 

It occurred to me this afternoon that the gauge of these is half 0 (hence H0) which explains the gauge. 1¼" becomes ⅝" = 16mm. Over the years an extra half millimetre was added (probably for clearance reasons?).

We can blame Bing and Greenly for 00. The same models were sold in the UK in British liveries (MR, LNWR and GNR IIRC). Made to the Continental loading gauge, they were a little oversized which was passed off as 4mm scale....

Edited August 8, 2021 by Il Grifone

[Mountain Goat]

I have a book published not long after the war in 1948 and it is about building model railway rolling stock in 4mm scale. Finescale modelling back in the 1930's in 4mm scale using 18mm gauge was quite well known about back then. The book even describes an early coupling along with split one sided versions using the same basic principles which is very similar to the tension lock coupling that is commonly found today.  

As far as I can gather Hornby had planned to produce a scale of half 0 gauge which would have been H0, but they struggled to get motors to fit so they slightly enlarged the bodies to 4mm scale and this was the start of what we now call 00.  (Be aware that I am going by what I have been told happened). 

But for finescale modellers, what later became known as EM was very much present back in the 1930's with quite a few cottage industries which had been set up to aid modellers in scratchbuilding in this scale. Ready to run was actually rare in these smaller sizes until Trix and Hornby decided to give it a go. Trix was a little more toylike at first but Hornby was in its day fairly accurate apart from running on 3 rail. Incidently the pre war 4mm scale modellers did use two rail with handmade track.  Rails were available for modellers to build their own track. 

 

It is really surprizing what was available back then. The only slightly unusual (Unusual in that they quickly became popular) was the popularity of the Peco coupling which if anything took over from the handmade examples of the tension lock type of design. 

 Here is a picture of a diagram straight from the book which demonstrates the coupings viewed from above.

 

 

 

Edited August 8, 2021 by Mountain Goat

[Il Grifone]

I have been informed that there is no record of Meccano Ltd. considering H0 and it was always going to be 00. Despite this, the N2 chassis is H0 (measure it) and the A4 driving wheels likewise*. It would explain the dimensions of the LNER coaches too**. It does indeed look like they had problems 'getting the works in'. By he time they designed the wagon underframe they had fixed on 00

British TT and N show the same problem.

 

*   They are about 23mm in diameter - 5' 9" in 00, but 6' 7" in H0.

** I can see no valid reason for making a model of a 52' 6" long coach underlength.

Edited August 8, 2021 by Il Grifone

[BernardTPM]

12 hours ago, Il Grifone said:

We can blame Bing and Greenly for 00. The same models were sold in the UK in British liveries (MR, LNWR and GNR IIRC). Made to the Continental loading gauge, they were a little oversized which was passed off as 4mm scale....

The early 2-4-0T though freelance has very obvious LNWR overtones to it. Might be nice to make a 'tribute' version of it some day.

[BernardTPM]

11 hours ago, Il Grifone said:

It does indeed look like they had problems 'getting the works in'. By he time they designed the wagon underframe they had fixed on 00

British TT and N show the same problem.

I think it's a shame that Lone Star's 2mm scale on 9mm track didn't become the standard small scale for British outline. 1:148 seems to have originated with Peco when they started making British outline bodies for Arnold chassis. Ironically overscale outline even for 1:148.

[PaulRhB]

50 minutes ago, BernardTPM said:

The early 2-4-0T though freelance has very obvious LNWR overtones to it. Might be nice to make a 'tribute' version of it some day.

The real ones pop up pretty often on eBay  

 

I’ve got a few Bing wagons to now but the TTR ones look good filling out the numbers. 

[sncf231e]

15 hours ago, Il Grifone said:

 

We can blame Bing and Greenly for 00. The same models were sold in the UK in British liveries (MR, LNWR and GNR IIRC). Made to the Continental loading gauge, they were a little oversized which was passed off as 4mm scale....

When I made the video I noticed that the JEP train was larger than the BING train, see picture:

 

I know Greenly mentioned that the Bing Table Railway was 4 mm scale, but I doubt about that. The width of the Bing locomotive at the running board is 32 mm. A 00 gauge 1:76 scale tank locomotive I had at hand has a width of 36 mm. The JEP locomotive has a width of 36.5 mm.

So I think Bing cannot be blamed for introducing 4 mm .

Regards

Fred

Edited August 9, 2021 by sncf231e

[PaulRhB]

8 minutes ago, sncf231e said:

think Bing cannot be blamed for introducing 4 mm

Depends what loco you choose, looks same size as a 4mm one here  

 

[Nearholmer]

15 hours ago, Il Grifone said:

Made to the Continental loading gauge, they were a little oversized which was passed off as 4mm scale....

They were simply oversized, or undersized, or slightly random ply sized, rather than to any prototypical loading gauge. Greenly was deeply involved in the design, and some accounts say that he and WJB-L had the concept on the go in 1914, so could probably have had it on the market c1917-18 if the war hadn’t messed things up.

 

 

Edited August 9, 2021 by Nearholmer

[PaulRhB]

Pick a small old HO loco and it looks about the same size. 
 

 

Bing called it the Table Railway it only got called OO later because that’s what the various similar sizes table railway lines got amalgamated into. 
Greenly used the term OO in the mid 20’s to describe the Bing trains and associated it with 4mm scale. 
The later definition of 16.5mm gauge as a standard was probably more to do with using existing parts from HO. 
So I’d say Bing was OO but it took a while for the definition of standards of it to be set firmly  

Edited August 9, 2021 by PaulRhB

[sncf231e]

29 minutes ago, PaulRhB said:

Pick a small old HO loco and it looks about the same size. 
 

 

So it is 1:87 and not 4 mm!

Regards

Fred

[Nearholmer]

All this fixation with scale, and scale/gauge ratio, is very post-hoc, and risks missing the point, which is that, particularly the electric sets, were a miracle of miniaturisation at the time - they were a genuinely very innovative product, very smart indeed at both the technical and marketing levels.

 

Yes, they did, almost immediately, spark the scale wars among “serious enthusiasts” that still concatenate (in the U.K., nowhere much else!) today, but they were toys, and flipping’ good ones.

[BernardTPM]

1 hour ago, sncf231e said:

So it is 1:87 and not 4 mm!

Regards

Fred

If that's old Rivarossi it would be 1:80 scale. Rubber scaling was not confined to the UK.

[PaulRhB]

3 hours ago, sncf231e said:

So it is 1:87 and not 4 mm!

Regards

Fred

Well a UK loco should be around 14% smaller than the US version and as the loco is of a generic prototype to be honest you could call it either. The vans stand the same height as OO ones but are shorter in length and narrower so a bit like G scale it depends which dimension you choose.  I found a Piko G diesel that was 1/29 in length, 1/26 in height and 1/24 in width!  

[PaulRhB]

 

There we go with a scale 4mm guards van  

[kevinlms]

21 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

All this fixation with scale, and scale/gauge ratio, is very post-hoc, and risks missing the point, which is that, particularly the electric sets, were a miracle of miniaturisation at the time - they were a genuinely very innovative product, very smart indeed at both the technical and marketing levels.

 

Yes, they did, almost immediately, spark the scale wars among “serious enthusiasts” that still concatenate (in the U.K., nowhere much else!) today, but they were toys, and flipping’ good ones.

Exactly, toys and people insist on trying to work out a scale that somehow matches!

 

Yet, strangely no one seems to try to work out, what scale LEGO trains are and somehow they are popular to many!

[Mark Carne]

19 hours ago, PaulRhB said:

Well a UK loco should be around 14% smaller than the US version and as the loco is of a generic prototype to be honest you could call it either. The vans stand the same height as OO ones but are shorter in length and narrower so a bit like G scale it depends which dimension you choose.  I found a Piko G diesel that was 1/29 in length, 1/26 in height and 1/24 in width!  

The loco isn't generic, it's an LNWR Chopper tank increased in size until it was big enough to take the smallest possible clockwork mech Bing could make.

 

Mark

[PaulRhB]

57 minutes ago, Mark Carne said:

The loco isn't generic, it's an LNWR Chopper tank increased in size until it was big enough to take the smallest possible clockwork mech Bing could make.

 

Mark

I was thinking more the way it was used to create all companies by changing the livery and US by adding a cow catcher 

[Il Grifone]

On 09/08/2021 at 14:00, sncf231e said:

When I made the video I noticed that the JEP train was larger than the BING train, see picture:

 

I know Greenly mentioned that the Bing Table Railway was 4 mm scale, but I doubt about that. The width of the Bing locomotive at the running board is 32 mm. A 00 gauge 1:76 scale tank locomotive I had at hand has a width of 36 mm. The JEP locomotive has a width of 36.5 mm.

So I think Bing cannot be blamed for introducing 4 mm .

Regards

Fred

 

It was of course supposed to be H0 scale (if you can talk about scale with these things). I understand there was a German version and an American version with a pilot/cowcatcher. (Trix and Dublo tried this later on, but they didn't fool anybody either.) Eight foot across the running plate is rather narrow though (possibly a Southern E2?).

Our local library had a book on the Bing system. The council were talking about closing it down (keep hoi polloi (ὁἱ πολλοί) ignorant) and I suspect Covid will have clinched the matter. I'll check when (if?) I can return to the UK.

[PaulRhB]

Interesting comparison to the Chopper Tank

[Il Grifone]

On 09/08/2021 at 16:11, BernardTPM said:

If that's old Rivarossi it would be 1:80 scale. Rubber scaling was not confined to the UK.

 

Rivarossi US models were 1:87 with the exception of the 'old time' locomotives which were a tad overscale. Their Italian models were* 1:80 (with buffers set at 1:87 - Trix went the other way. Theirs are 00 or actually a fraction over).

 

* They are now 1:87. Very annoying as I can only add heritage models to the collection.

[Il Grifone]

48 minutes ago, Il Grifone said:

 

It was of course supposed to be H0 scale (if you can talk about scale with these things). I understand there was a German version and an American version with a pilot/cowcatcher. (Trix and Dublo tried this later on, but they didn't fool anybody either.) Eight foot across the running plate is rather narrow though (possibly a Southern E2?).

Our local library had a book on the Bing system. The council were talking about closing it down (keep hoi polloi (ὁἱ πολλοί) ignorant) and I suspect Covid will have clinched the matter. I'll check when (if?) I can return to the UK.

 

The library is still going according to the web!     but no sign of the book in the catalogue. 'Bing' just brings up some wretched rabbit!

FOUND! it's titled 'Bing's Table Railway'.

 

Lego rails are spaced at 5 pegs apart which suggests about gauge 1.

Looking I found this:

https://www.amazon.it/italiani-istruzioni-costruire-locomotore-mattoncini/dp/8869283097

 

I will not start Lego trains!  I will not start Lego trains!  I will not start Lego trains!...

[Pacific231G]

On 08/08/2021 at 21:52, Il Grifone said:

Lovely!

 

It occurred to me this afternoon that the gauge of these is half 0 (hence H0) which explains the gauge. 1¼" becomes ⅝" = 16mm. Over the years an extra half millimetre was added (probably for clearance reasons?).

We can blame Bing and Greenly for 00. The same models were sold in the UK in British liveries (MR, LNWR and GNR IIRC). Made to the Continental loading gauge, they were a little oversized which was passed off as 4mm scale....

H0, as a name, came rather later, at least in Britain (but scale model railways as opposed to toy trains on the one hand and model engineering on the other originated in Britain,) Originally,  sizes were defined by gauge (as in model engineering) so no. 2 no.1 and, for those who were space starved, no. 0 gauge. 00 was originally referred to  as no. 00 gauge but Greenly chose to make the scale 4mm/ft for that gauge while others used the correct scale of 3.5mm/ft. Greenly, who was a miniature railway engineer, seems to have seen model railways as very small miniature rather than scale model railways  and he had an aesthetic and engineering preference  for making the scale of the model larger than that of the track (as on the RHDR and the Rattie)  There was a bit of a battle about this in the 1920s and 1930s and eventually A.R. Walkley, whose ground breaking 1926 Portable "00 " Gauge Goods Yard , had most definitely been 3.5mm/ft,   announced in MRN that henceforth he would  refer to his models as "Half 0"  scale which J.N. Maskelyne, the editor of MRN and a long time advocate of  3.5mm/ft, later shortened to H0.   

 

On 08/08/2021 at 22:22, Mountain Goat said:

I have a book published not long after the war in 1948 and it is about building model railway rolling stock in 4mm scale. Finescale modelling back in the 1930's in 4mm scale using 18mm gauge was quite well known about back then. The book even describes an early coupling along with split one sided versions using the same basic principles which is very similar to the tension lock coupling that is commonly found today.  

 

Looking through my bound volumes of MRN, I can find a lot of discussion of using 4mm/ft scale with 19mm gauge but  only one or two actual layouts.  E.R. Twining referred to  the gauge but the first actual layout I can find was H.D. Pinnington's  in 1939 . He does mention that Stewart-Reidpath couldn't come up with an insulated two rail loco chassis in less than 19mm gauge so others  were presumably experimenting with this gauge which was adopted in America as 00 gauge.  One or two people were talking about 18mm gauge to avoid some of the problems of Britain's small loading gauge but it was the BRMSB, which met during WW2 when the halt to model manufacturing gave hope of a clean sheet post war "reboot", who sttled on 18mm gauge for "scale 00" (later rebranded EM)