The forerunners of H0/00 gauge

[PaulRhB]

Now allowing for the repairs mentioned above I also fancied a way of running these without hammering the old springs all the time. So I’ve bought a ARU motor bogie kit that’s only 1mm out and I’m going to try and fit it to a coach or van by removing the wheels and passing the wires through a tab hole to have a battery powered option. 

[Nearholmer]

Will the locos freewheel then? I'd always assumed, not having any of them, that there was no "neutral" or clutch.

[PaulRhB]

13 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Will the locos freewheel then? I'd always assumed, not having any of them, that there was no "neutral" or clutch.

I have three locos with broken springs so I was thinking of keeping one LNWR and one LNER like that so they will freewheel still. Then when I want to I can run them rather than wearing out the good springs every time. It’s also nice to have one running when doing other jobs and I do the same when I have the Billerbahn out, that does have a freewheel setting. 
Just a nice to have option. 

[RJS1977]

On 24/08/2021 at 15:02, kevinlms said:

Agreed, I didn't write that at all well. A decimal system is NOT the same as metric.

 

However, what is true about what I wrote earlier, is that decimal or metric are much easier to work with than any Imperial (British), Customary (US) or any other 'old, historical' standard.

 

Yet, ironically the original Roman mile was a decimal system - 1 mile equated to 1000 paces, with each pace equivalent to five Roman feet. This system remained in use in the UK until Elizabethan times, when the foot was redefined, making the mile 5,280 feet or 1760 yards.

[Il Grifone]

And the inch varied depending where you were. Napoleon is considered short until it is considered he was measured in French inches which are longer than the British, so he was actually about 5' 6" (allegedly). The German inch varied from state to state. The metric system sorted all that out, fixing the metre as a fraction of the Earth's circumference at zero degrees of longitude, which passed through Paris at the time (not that it matters much). The metre then defines all the other units.

 

Can you still get springs for Bing locomotives or is it necessary to go into the world of clockmaking?

 

Edited August 28, 2021 by Il Grifone

[Pacific231G]

On 28/08/2021 at 10:42, Il Grifone said:

And the inch varied depending where you were. Napoleon is considered short until it is considered he was measured in French inches which are longer than the British, so he was actually about 5' 6" (allegedly). The German inch varied from state to state. The metric system sorted all that out, fixing the metre as a fraction of the Earth's circumference at zero degrees of longitude, which passed through Paris at the time (not that it matters much). The metre then defines all the other units.

 

Can you still get springs for Bing locomotives or is it necessary to go into the world of clockmaking?

 

Napoleon Bonaparte was of about average adult male height for that era and it was the cartoons of Gillray that mockingly depicted him as short.

 

The metre was originally defined as 1/10 millionth  of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along the French line of zero longitude which passed through the Paris Observatory. (There were several competing Zero Longitudes at that time before the Greenwich meridian was agreed on) The calculated length was used to produce a standard metre bar but  turned out to be very slightly different from the actual meridional distance (but only by about two parts in ten  thousand) So, until the 1960s, the metre was defined not by the actual distance from pole to equator which would obviously change as survey measurement got more accurate but as the distance, at 0°C, between the axes of the two central lines marked on the bar of platinum–iridium kept at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (which is in Paris but under international control) It's now defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second.

[Pacific231G]

On 23/08/2021 at 10:57, railroadbill said:

On the other hand (as I once had to point out to some "metric country" relatives who were taking the mickey) take a length of string.  Fold it in half. That's 1/2. Fold it again, that's 1/4. And again, 1/8th. Again, 1/16th. Then 1/32, 1/64, 1/128, 1/256,  still easily manageable.  But with metric,  0.5, 0.25,  0.125, 0.0625, 0.03125, 0.015625 and so on.  Getting a little more tricky to do in your head....

 

When I was at school and we got to GCE O levels (as then was) we had just turned to metric for maths problems, but we used centimetres and centilitres .  A year or two after us it changed to millimetres and litres etc. so we were experimental forerunners of British metrication....

 

Despite buying petrol/diesel in litres for many years, I still have a need to work out the car's fuel consumption in MPG though....

 

You think you have problems.

In my other hobby I buy fuel in litres for fuel tanks whose capacities are given in US gallons, weights are in kilos, distances are measured in nautical miles and wind speeds in knots but the Air Speed Indicator is marked in Miles Per Hour while runway lengths are in metres but altitudes are in feet. Fortunately, apart from nautical miles /miles and US gallons/Litres  most of those measures don't directly affect one another.

 

When I was growing up I used feet and inches for everyday measures but CGS for science, I then trained as a ship's engineer in imperial units including Fahrenheit tempertures, pressures in PSI and heat in BTUs before going on to do an engineering degree in SI. 

I later worked in radio where tape speeds were in in inches per second and then in television where studios were marked in feet, and time was measured both in feet (of film) or in hours, minutes, seconds and twenty fifths of a second (frames).  When metrication came along -in order  to avoid having to change all the rough measurements used for laying out scenery etc.- a metric foot was devised which is 300mm.   

 

I notice that the location of railway structures such as bridges are still given in miles, chains, and rods (or possibly poles or peches) expressed as quarter chains from a point of origin. 

 

It's a great shame we don't have twelve digits on our hands as base twelve arithmetic  would have enabled very useful fractions of a half, third, quarter, and sixth whereas decimal only gives halves. Even if we'd counted on our fingers alone we'd have had base eight with halves and quarters,   

[kevinlms]

13 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

You think you have problems.

In my other hobby I buy fuel in litres for fuel tanks whose capacities are given in US gallons, weights are in kilos, distances are measured in nautical miles and wind speeds in knots but the Air Speed Indicator is marked in Miles Per Hour while runway lengths are in metres but altitudes are in feet. Fortunately, apart from nautical miles /miles and US gallons/Litres  most of those measures don't directly affect one another.

 

When I was growing up I used feet and inches for everyday measures but CGS for science, I then trained as a ship's engineer in imperial units including Fahrenheit tempertures, pressures in PSI and heat in BTUs before going on to do an engineering degree in SI. 

I later worked in radio where tape speeds were in in inches per second and then in television where studios were marked in feet, and time was measured both in feet (of film) or in hours, minutes, seconds and twenty fifths of a second (frames).  When metrication came along -in order  to avoid having to change all the rough measurements used for laying out scenery etc.- a metric foot was devised which is 300mm.   

 

I notice that the location of railway structures such as bridges are still given in miles, chains, and rods (or possibly poles or peches) expressed as quarter chains from a point of origin. 

 

It's a great shame we don't have twelve digits on our hands as base twelve arithmetic  would have enabled very useful fractions of a half, third, quarter, and sixth whereas decimal only gives halves. Even if we'd counted on our fingers alone we'd have had base eight with halves and quarters,   

This is where resistance to change has got us!

[Il Grifone]

There is of course no reason our ancestors couldn't have invented a logical system in the first place!

[sncf231e]

Back to the topic i.e. "The forerunners of H0/00 gauge".

 

One would expect that S gauge (which with 22.5 mm is in between 0 and H0/00) was a forerunner, but it wasn't. It was introduced in the USA in the late thirties.

 

But there were more gauges smaller then 0. In the BING catalogue of 1909 Bing shows a 28 mm clockwork train, which has a gauge of 25 mm as we measure it now. JEP of course followed using this gauge in 1920 and CR in 1930.

 

Earlier already some makers, like CR and JdeP of France, made 33 mm (30 mm gauge)  trains; although smaller then 0 gauge one can question whether they were meant as a beginning of a smaller gauge/scale combination.

 

The Bing 28 mm train was made in various liveries and the version shown was of course for the British market and shows a remarkable good representation of LSWR livery:

 

The video shows a number of the 28 mm and 33mm trains from BING, JEP and CR.

 

The BING N gauge sized floorrunner without mechanism cannot be considered a forerunner:

 

Regards

Fred

[RJS1977]

On 31/08/2021 at 14:11, Il Grifone said:

There is of course no reason our ancestors couldn't have invented a logical system in the first place!

 

I think, for them, it was a logical system (certainly the units of length).

 

For matters where ballpark figures were needed, rather than absolute precision, units like the inch, span, foot, cubit or pace (or other units derived from them like the Roman mile) were perfectly adequate and could be measured approximately by the measurer's person without a need for a ruler or yardstick (although a standard 'foot' had existed since at least Roman times).

 

On the other hand, a measurement based on the circumference of the earth or on the speed of light would have been rather less useful. Whilst the fact the earth is round had been known since antiquity  there was by medieval times still some debate as to exactly what the radius was. Likewise the value of the speed of light wasn't finally agreed upon until the 1950s.