Oct 28 2008
“Space the final frontier”. Scale matters!
“Space the final frontier”. Scale matters!
Space is one of the main factors in having fun with your model railroad.
Let’s suppose you want to have a mixed freight and passenger station with a small switching yard nearby. Your switching yard will need track long enough to store various freight cars, passenger cars, and engines, and additional tracks for the train as it is made up or joined together. The tracks will need to be far enough apart to allow trains to pass each other (without collision), and each track spaced apart to hold the model switches. You’ll also want to have an industry or two receiving and manufacturing materials and goods.
Your passenger station may have a road or even a main street of a town establishing a place for arriving and departing passengers. To help set the time frame, part of the country and general setting you might want to model some of the buildings and terrain - such as a river, some slopes, trees, and land with shrubs and grasses.
The trains at the station may need some refueling or maintenance. The trains may also need some signals and switch controls. You may have admired photos or paintings of trains crossing a river, or deep gorge on a winding section of track near a mountain and a bridge.
Before you know it your railroad is growing and everything takes space.
You may want to run your train in a loop at times so you can relax and chat with others while the trains run. A simple loop or figure “8″ gets boring quickly, if that is all you have. There are times you might want to challenge yourself, “play trains”, and concentrate on switching from track to track and carefully assembling a train for its schedule of pickups and deliveries. To run more than one train you may need passing sidings or two or more parallel tracks. More space. You may have a special engine or long passenger or freight car. Long train equipment need larger radius curves to run reliably and to look realistic in a scene.
Scale has a direct impact on how much space each of the same items will require on your railroad. A 60 foot long railroad car in G scale (1:20.3) will be about 35 -1/2 inches long; in HO scale (1:87) a 60 foot long car will be about 8 - 1/4 inches long; a 60 foot car in N scale (1:160) will be 4 - 1/2 inches long. As you can see, scale matters.
