Coarse Scale O Gauge

[sncf231e]

Later in the year I will (I hope) show a video of the Ivatt Atlantic in my garden; today I played with some small French Hornb's:

Regards

Fred

[Nearholmer]

I added a "funny", because those M Series trains always make me smile - they are cheerfully innocent, or innocently cheerful, I'm not sure which.

[Mark Carne]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

http://www.bluebell-railway.co.uk/bluebell/locos/atlantic/
 

I know that Paul has in mind the LBSCR one too, if there is enough interest. Quite why this one first, I don’t know - maybe there are technical as well as commercial reasons for following the historical precedent set by the real things.

I have to admit, I'm equally bemused as to why they have chosen to do things this way round, what with the new LBSCR Atlantic at the Bluebell being so close to completion. No big news stories to accompany the GN version, as far as I'm aware?

 

Either way, I'm in, I've got to be, after the campaign a friend and I have mounted against Paul for the last 3 or 4 years.....

 

Mark

[goldfish]

Having converted a No.0 Tender Locomotive I obviously need a Tank Loco to go with it.

 

 

The clockwork motor that came with it could best be described as "complete - some assembly required". I don't think that motor is original. Did these ever come with 2.25" wheelbase motors?

 

I find these early Hornby offerings to have a charm all of their own. It is odd that the same company came up with the No.1 Special Tank just a few years later. I appreciate the need to accommodate a large spring, but the earlier Tanks are more convincing as models.

[Nearholmer]

Couldn't agree more: the early No.1 locos, and the No.2 locos, are well-proportioned machines, especially the No.2 tank engine, IMO, but what followed, apart from the more "scale" 4-4-0 and 4-6-2, are variously ill-proportioned. Maybe the 0-4-0 tender engines are just about OK, but the rest are "a poke in the eye".

[sncf231e]

Because of the beautiful weather I played with some clockwork trains again. This time some simple and cheap trains from the American toy manufacturer MARX:

Not everyone's cup of tea, but I like them 

Regards

Fred

Edited May 16, 2021 by sncf231e

[johnhutnick]

I have been in contact with Paul Lumsdon, WJVintage, regarding the GNR/LNER 4-4-2.  For anyone interested, they will produce a model with flanges to run on regular O gauge Peco track.  The price is GBP 695, which is not unreasonable for newly produce tender loco.

[Annie]

14 hours ago, sncf231e said:

Because of the beautiful weather I played with some clockwork trains again. This time some simple and cheap trains from the American toy manufacturer MARX:

I used to have some of those, - they're a lot of fun.

[sncf231e]

On 12/05/2021 at 16:15, sncf231e said:

Because of the beautiful weather I played with some clockwork trains again. This time some simple and cheap trains from the American toy manufacturer MARX:

Not everyone's cup of tea, but I like them 

Regards

Fred

The sequel. This afternoon I played with some MARX electric trains:

 

Regards

Fred

[goldfish]

The story goes that 0 Gauge has its origins in continental tinplate toy trains that had track with the rails at 35mm centres, giving a distance between the rails of 32mm. What is never explained is why the rails were at 35mm centres.

 

If we go back to basics, and look at creating an accurate scale rendering of the prototype Standard Gauge of four foot eight and a half inches, a rather plausible explanation for the choice of 35mm centres presents itself.
Four foot eight and a half inches, or 56.5inches, is 113 Half Inches. 113 is prime so there is no convenient factor that can be used as the scale.
But, four foot eight and a half inches is also 1435mm (1435.1mm if you want to be pedantic), and 1435 is not prime. The prime factors of 1435 are {5, 7, 41}.
If you take the scale to be 1:41, then the gauge becomes 35mm exactly. It isn't a major leap to suggest that the German toy makers were fully aware of this relationship, but decided to measure the gauge at the rail centres because they were working with tinplate and that was the easiest dimension to control. On the other hand it might just be pure coincidence.

 

It isn't the only coincidence. In the days when steamroller wheels were in vogue it was accepted practice to make wagon bodies oversize to accommodate the wheels. The usual width for a wagon being 60mm. A standard RCH wagon is 8' wide and 16' 6" long. Which means that width of the wagon is to a scale of 1:40.64, which is pretty close to 1:41.

I don't know how usual the practice was, but some tinplate wagons were made oversize in length as well, so that the body had the correct proportions. I have a Bassett Lowke LMS open wagons which has a body 59mm wide and 123mm long, giving it a length to width ratio of 2.08 compared to the actual length to width relationship of a RCH wagon of 2.06. The body of this wagon is basically made to a scale of 1.41. Another pure coincidence perhaps?

 

Coarse scale wagons of that era also had over height buffers, I cannot find a definitive reference anywhere, but it would appear that the generally accepted value was that the height of the centre of the buffer above rail height was 1". According to the RCH drawings the actual height of the centre of the buffer above rail height was 3' 5.25", or 41.25". Need I go on?

 

It would seem that some coarse scale rolling stock was modelled at a scale of 1:41. Although this may have been quite inadvertent, and was purely down to the fortuitous choice of body width to accommodate the steamroller wheels.

 

It is an interesting thought that if these 1:41 scale bodies were fitted with wheels to run on 35mm track, they would have a better claim to accuracy than ScaleSeven, because the track gauge would actually be exactly true to scale.

 

My Bassett Lowke 1:41 scale 0 Gauge wagon.

 

[Nearholmer]

I have heard it suggested that the original between-centres measurements somehow originated in Zolls, German inches, but quite how I’m not sure.

 

The standardised Zoll converts to 26.4mm, IIRC, it’s certainly ever so slightly longer than a standard British inch, but there were local variations pre-standardisation, some of which were in customary use in particular trades.

 

The other thought is that the between-centres measurements were not the defining feature in themselves, but that the widths over plates of standard cheap clockworks were. Take a one inch/zoll wide clockwork, put axles with wheels outside it, allowing operating clearances and flange-width, does one get 35mm between centres of rails? Next clockwork up, does that give 48mm? Etc. Be worth a delve into German history to find out.

 

I’m pretty sure in my mind that nobody started to think about scale for these toy items until a decade or more after they’d become common enough for the emergent clan of railway modellers to get involved.

 

Nicholas Oddy called his article about all this in the TCS journal “Gauge first, scale after”, and I’d trust his knowledge and deductions.

[goldfish]

3 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I have heard it suggested that the original between-centres measurements somehow originated in Zolls, German inches, but quite how I’m not sure.

 

This is interesting. It appears that the Zoll is part of an obsolete system of units that also included the Linien and the Fuss. Where 12 Linien = 1 Zoll, and 12 Zoll = 1 Fuss. It so happens that 1 Zoll + 4 Linien = 34.87mm, so perhaps that is where the 35mm came from. It appears that 0 Gauge was defined somewhere between 1891 and 1895, and the Zoll became obsolete in 1872, so the Zoll must have lingered on in the clockwork makers trade. I have a couple of early Hornby clockwork motors which are 0.8 and 0.9 Zoll thick, so it would not be unreasonable to assume that clockwork motors were nominally 1 Zoll thick.

[goldfish]

11 hours ago, goldfish said:

 

This is interesting. It appears that the Zoll is part of an obsolete system of units that also included the Linien and the Fuss. Where 12 Linien = 1 Zoll, and 12 Zoll = 1 Fuss. It so happens that 1 Zoll + 4 Linien = 34.87mm, so perhaps that is where the 35mm came from. It appears that 0 Gauge was defined somewhere between 1891 and 1895, and the Zoll became obsolete in 1872, so the Zoll must have lingered on in the clockwork makers trade. I have a couple of early Hornby clockwork motors which are 0.8 and 0.9 Zoll thick, so it would not be unreasonable to assume that clockwork motors were nominally 1 Zoll thick.

 

Doing a little more research it seems Linien is the plural form and Line or Line is the singular. What ever the correct grammar, 16 Linie(n) = 34.874111mm and 22 Linie(n) = 47.951902mm. So it would appear that model railway gauges have their roots in historical Prussian units of measure.

[sncf231e]

1 hour ago, goldfish said:

 

historical Prussian units of measure.

Note that that all the early German trainmakers, including Märklin who set the standards for the gauges, were not Prussian but Bavarian. Further: I have read many German (and English and France) books on the history of model and toy railways and never read something about these "Prussian units of measure" being used for this (my own e-book on the subject: http://sncf231e.nl/gauge-and-scale/). The standards were not only on the gauge but also on track length and circle diameter. These values are all in mm.

Regards

Fred

[goldfish]

48 minutes ago, sncf231e said:

Note that that all the early German trainmakers, including Märklin who set the standards for the gauges, were not Prussian but Bavarian. Further: I have read many German (and English and France) books on the history of model and toy railways and never read something about these "Prussian units of measure" being used for this (my own e-book on the subject: http://sncf231e.nl/gauge-and-scale/). The standards were not only on the gauge but also on track length and circle diameter. These values are all in mm.

Regards

Fred

 

Thank you for that Fred, your e-book is an interesting read.

 

50 minutes ago, sncf231e said:

Note that that all the early German trainmakers, including Märklin who set the standards for the gauges, were not Prussian but Bavarian.

 

The Märklin factory was in Göppingen, which was then in the Kingdom of Württemberg, I am not they would have appreciated being called Bavarians.

 

Michael

[cypherman]

Hi all,

Out of idle curiosity does this count as course scale. Sadly this railway no longer exist as it was sold to fund other projects.

Edited July 7, 2021 by cypherman

[sncf231e]

Sold?

You'll never win:

 

Regards

Fred

[goldfish]

On 06/07/2021 at 16:31, Nearholmer said:

Nicholas Oddy called his article about all this in the TCS journal “Gauge first, scale after”, and I’d trust his knowledge and deductions.

 

My apologies for going off topic.

 

I have come across a piece about the deliberations of the BRMSB in the January 1947 edition of The Model Railways Constructor that suggests that the sequence might better be described as “Gauge first, scale after, and then Gauge again”.

 

It seems that the BRMSB were not taking the prototype as their starting point, instead they took the existing scales as their starting point. The approach appears to been to look at the ratio between the Scale and the Gauge. Taking this approach the prototype has a ratio of 12 to 56.5, or 1:4.71. For practical reasons the BRMSB were working on a ratio of around 1:4.6. With a minimum ratio of 1:4.5, which gives a prototype gauge of 4' 6". The deliberations of the BRMSB clearly deserve to be better known.

Edited July 9, 2021 by goldfish

[Nearholmer]

Yes, gauge-scale-gauge makes perfect sense.

 

There were also two parallel paths of thinking: commercial r-t-r on one hand; amateur scale model-making on the other. Skilled amateurs always sought to obtain greater fidelity in gauge and things like check-rail clearances.

[rockershovel]

I'd tend to feel that the dimensions of the generic clockwork mechanism were the ruling consideration - an essential component from an outside supplier which would have existing standards. The training designer wouldn't be concerned about scale, simply that the end product could accommodate the required components. The other critical issue would be the overall size; its clear that from a very early stage, continuing to the present, an overall circumference of around 30" was seen as a necessary feature of the track

[goldfish]

28 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

The other critical issue would be the overall size; its clear that from a very early stage, continuing to the present, an overall circumference of around 30" was seen as a necessary feature of the track

 

Have you got your units mixed up? According to my shaky maths, a circle with a circumference of 30" has a diameter of 9.5".

[rockershovel]

1 hour ago, goldfish said:

 

Have you got your units mixed up? According to my shaky maths, a circle with a circumference of 30" has a diameter of 9.5".

Curse of autocorrect, I meant diameter or better, footprint

Edited July 9, 2021 by rockershovel

[Il Grifone]

I've always assumed that the 30" diameter was to fit on a standard table (presumably when mum and/or SWMBO was not around hence tabletop in various manifestations.

 

German (and Italian* probably others?) prototype practice was to measure the gauge between the rail centres. (OK until you try to use a beefier rail section, but I would have thought it easier to measure between the rails). The toy manufacturers followed suit. 35mm gauge, with a 3mm diameter rail head, becomes 32mm measured properly. Finding a scale to fit the gauge came afterwards.

I believe standard gauge came from 4' 6" plateways. To clear the flanges on the rails the wheels had to be a couple of inches farther apart. Fitting flanges to the wheels meant the rails had to move farther apart (or perhaps the rail section gave the gauge avoiding moving the rail fixings).

 

*The local Sardinian metre gauge is actually 950mm.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Il Grifone
Italian keyboard and hitting the wrong key!

[sncf231e]

Coarse scale 0 gauge does not have to be 3-rail, it can be 2-rail:

Regards

Fred

[goldfish]

19 hours ago, sncf231e said:

Coarse scale 0 gauge does not have to be 3-rail, it can be 2-rail:

Fred,

That 4-4-0 looks superb. Who makes it please, and any chance of of a better picture?

regards,

Michael