Matters of scale

[SapperAnt]

Hmmmmmmmmm! Muchos pondering.

Now I have desposed of all the rolling stock I purchased which was of a suitable scale for my Mamod and considering the rather chunky and perhaps overscale for 16mm of my Ragleth, I am sort of semi seriously looking at upping to 7/8th scale running on 32mm as that's the track I've got and my scratch built rolling stock, scaled to look ok behind the Ragleth is also similarly chunky....

One could always run as 16mm 2 foot gauge of 7/8th 18 inch gauge depending on the mood perhaps.

I'm really rather taken by some of the Jurassic and Acme Kits.

Could anyone proffer any advice?

[robbieg96]

ah the big debate that is scales!

Personally, i don't let scale bother me too much, but obviously i like things to look right and not to big and not too small. I think of my railway just as being 'narrow gauge'. However, with the buildings on the line removed during the winter i could easily run 7/8ths stock.

I tend to run trains in sets, with locos that look good with certain items of stock.

I run on 45mm track, as its what we started out with. I agree that the accucraft generic/classic locos (i have an Edrig, which i have built a cab on, so its the same size as Ragleth) are pretty chunky, but i think it looks good on 45mm with stock to match.

I really wanted a suitable driver for my Accucraft that fills the cab nicely. I did buy a 7/8ths figure at a show, just to see how it looked on the loco and it was slighly too big. However i will keep the figure if i ever pick up one of Accucraft's Quarry Hunslets!

The modeltown figures that i mainly use look good. But i also tried some old 1:16th scale dolls house figures. The size was good, but they were bendy and were wearing weird clothes.

I ended up making a figure to fill the cab from Fimo Air and i am pretty pleased with it!

I guess at the end of the day it is all about what you feel happy with and what looks right. You could rust run a bit of everything, just not at the same time :-)

Anyway I hope some of this helps!

I am also interested in those that model 2'6" gauge lines. Do you use 32mm or 45mm track?

-Rob

[IrishPeter]

I model 2'6" gauge and go with 45mm.  2'6" gauge equipment is often on the chunky side - closer to 90cm gauge and 3' gauge in scale than 2' gauge stuff - and being slightly over, rather than somewhat under gauge means I can slip in the odd 3' gauge prototype if I want to.  

Some of the systems built to that 30"/75cm/76cm gauge reached a considerable size - for example in Sierra Leone had about 300 miles of 2'6" gauge and the old Yugoslavia close on 1500km of 76cm gauge.  Even some of the old VGNG lines (of which Walhalla and Puffing Billy are the survivors) were quite long branches. However, the piece de resistence had to have been the old Dubrovnik-Sarajevo-Belgrade mainline which was 76cm gauge NG and was not replaced with SG until the 1960s and 70s!

For me the distraction from my main interest is modelling SG light railways in the old coarse scale Ga.1 - 10mm/ft.  This still has a nice amount of heft to it, but isn't as overwhelming as Ga.3 (Spur II) 13.5mm/ft SG equipment.  Also it has enough industry support that although I can scratch build I would not have to, and that is fine with me. However, I started out 45mm gauge and 2'6" and 3' gauge prototype so that's where I will stay!

The only evil to 2'6" gauge in 16mm/Ga.1 is making 16mm SG wagons for your transporter wagons. That is a project I am not really looking forward to. If you use L&MVLR style transporters you cannot really fudge with Ga.3 stuff (of which there is very little and it is expensive) unless you widen them to 75mm gauge!  However, that problem only strikes when one has Calthropitis.  I think you could get away with it with the German type of transporter. Anyhoo... most Roundhouse and Accy generics make nice looking 2'6" gauge locos even though they look a little over scale when running on 32mm.

Cheers,
Peter in AZ