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Any love for 'O' Gauge and will it make a comeback?


Choobacca

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Hi. I've just been looking around a model railway shop in Sheffield and noticed a very nice Bassett Lowke J39 'O' gauge locomotive. It reminded me of an 'O' gauge Lima LMS loco I had as a child over 30 years ago!

So I was thinking, will 'O' gauge

ever make a comeback? It might look big and bulky compared to 'OO' gauge, though there's something about this scale that looks very right.

I think the tinplate wagons would probably only appeal to toy collectors, though plastic wagons could look just

as realistic (if not more so) than 'OO' gauge rolling stock.

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Hi Choobacca
"O"scale hasn't gone away.
Basset Lowke (Spelling) who are owned by Hornby make it RTR
There are a number of brands of kit available for "O" scale wagons and coaches as well as locomotives also track.
You can even buy brand new

tinplate.
It's less popular than it once was because of the space required for a decent layout.
eg 16' X 8' will get you the same as 8' X 4' in OO scale
It is also very expensive per unit which puts people off even though a practical layout
doesn't

cost any more in "O" to build a good layout.
It will however require some scratch building at some point in layout construction
Which in OO provided you like the same as every body else can be avoided.
A well done "O" layout looks very realistic and

you can see the smaller details
which in OO would be hard to see.
In "O" you have to have all the small details or it looks toy like
regards John
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While I remain an OO follower, I was very impressed by an O gauge layout belonging to a club member at my model railway club's Golden Jubilee exhibition. It showed a station (it turned into a fiddle yard giving the impression of a much longer station)

and then a post sorting yard and building in 70's BR blue. There were DMUs, shunters and larger deisel locos, but the thing about using O gauge was that the DCC features were used to their maximum - exhaust fumes, very realistic sound, and even lights along

the side of a breakdown train. It was built up above ground level and the larger scale allowed for more detail in things like badly parked cars and advertisments.
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The Basset Lowke stuff only really does appeal to toy collectors I think, or people who collect/run old-school tinplate trains at any rate. Most modern O gauge isn't like that though, being very realistic, and only really indulged in by serious modellers.

Like the others have said, it never went away, but is for "proper" modellers only. To build a decent-sized layout you will need large amounts of money, space and modelling/kit-building skills (either that or even larger amounts of money to have someone do

the model-making for you).

While most O gauge is kit based, there is more RTR stuff appearing on the market these days. Heljan have been putting out O scale RTR diesel locos and Mk1 coaches for a while now, but as you might imagine they're not cheap

(something like £250 a coach). There are also a few small-time firms like Skytrex, L.H. Loveless and Golden-Age who make small ranges of even more expensive RTR stuff (An O scale Golden-Age A4 is about £2500).

I don't think O gauge will ever

"make a comeback" because it will always be more expensive than 00, at least in comparable levels of detail (which are higher for O, due to the larger size). Plus the space needed that most people simply do not have, and the extra modelling skills required

to make the most of it.

You're right that detailed O looks more realistic than 00, but it's also far more costly, in more ways than one!
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Dont write it off just because of cost or space. It depends upon what YOU want. Dont forget the garden too. I have just put some SM32 track in our allotment and whilst this restricts methods of power, i intend to use Live Steam and battery. Triang Big

Big can get you started for less than £50 for a battery loco. You can have finescale or coarse or both, narrow or standard gauge etc etc. My most wanted will be a Heljan 26 in blue with Highland twin lights but thats a while away in release so it gives me

time to save !
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Wise words CTP.
I am rebuilding my garden railway this summer and would be out there now if it wasn't raining. Mine is Course Scale Three rail, and despite what was said earlier the Bassett Lowke models look very good in a garden setting. I bought some

Lima mineral wagons the other day, perhaps if Hornby still had the moulds they could bring these back in the B-L range?

Yes it can be expensive but you do get a lot of 'bangs for your bucks'. An 'O' gauge loco is 8 times bigger than a 'OO' one!

Cornish

Triang Paul said:

Dont write it off just because of cost or space.
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The volume is a cubic increase, and thus the weight and size of a three dimensional object increases in proportion as the product of multiplying each dimension. Actually as 'OO' is 4mm scale and 'O' is 7mm scale I will concede 5.36 times! It is however

considerably chunkier!

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Correct - having just done my maths GCSE a few weeks ago, I can verify that as the track width is a linear dimention and volume is a volume dimention (as one would expect), the ratio has to be cubed - here OO:O is about 1:2 in track width so the loco volumes

would be 1 cubed: 2 cubed = 1:8. If they are made of the same materials, then the density would remain the same and as density links to mass and voume, the mass of materials used would be 8 times as much.

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/pedantic_mode=on/

Ignoring irregularities caused by non-linear gauge and scale ratios, a more precise difference in size between 0 scale and 00 scale is ( 76.2 / 43.5 ) cubed = 5.375

And of course we are really talking about 0 (zero) and

00 scales rather than O (Oh) and OO (Double-Oh). If you look closely you will see that Hornby uses 00 on the packaging.

And, in anycase what exactly is either "0" or "O" scale?

UK: 1/43.5 (7mm/')
Europe: 1/45
North America: 1/48

/pedantic_mode=off/

What

a mess scales and gauges are! At least the North American O is a sensible quarter inch to the foot. This notion of mm per foot is such a bizzare invention, but it is what it is and we shall have to put up with it.

British outline H0 anyone?
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