You could always go for Metric Standard Gauge – 1.5352 metres (or thereabouts)!

John

The gauge of something – anything – is a measure of the device, item or whatever.

A petrol gauge in a car usually measures only fractions of fullness of the fuel tank.

The gauge of a shot gun is the number of lead balls (of a specific density) which, when produced from exactly one pound of that lead, are the size of the barrel.

Pressure guages normally have an indicated range.

Rain guages collect water and read off in inches or mm, normally. The collector is much larger than the calibrated vessel.

There is clearly no connection between any of the above guages. Model engineering is no different in that respect.

A railway track was gauged by the width of two horses rear ends, side by side, but is now usually defined in inches for Imperial sized model railways.

There are 12 inches to a foot – no variation on that one! (x is usually an unknown value which needs to be calculated from an equation, or the abscissa on a graph).

As guages are specific to the measurement under discussion, a 6” scale model cannot be compared to a rail guage – no more than the rail guage is comparable (in absolute units) to any other gauge (like a shotgun or pressure gauge).

Clearly, with model trains they have both a scale and a gauge and most people only refer to the one aspect which seems important to them at the time. No different than beekeepers who denote hive boxes as ‘broods’ and ‘supers’ when they are actually deep and shallow boxes (and each can be, and are, used as either brood or honey boxes, dependent on the beekeeper). No different than sloppy electical notations for the cross sectional areas of conducors.

Whenever anyone asks me to spell ‘it’ or ‘that’, they get exactly what they asked for!

As far as railway modelling goes (that is both passenger hauling and scenic) the standardisation on gauge rather than scale was established by a toy manufacturer in the late 19th century. Over time time this has provided many more problems for the smaller scale scenic modellers.

Given you've got standard gauge wrong you may need to double check your height as well.

Andrew

Most areas of human endeavour end up with a specific vocabulary that is used in depth by the experts who need it, and to a lesser extent by the public in a simplified form. You just lean the half dozen meanings you need.

I started with 8in, then 5in, then it was 3 or was it 3.25 all obsolete now and the 5in we used in our product became a 3in, and now 2 1/2 in to make the product smaller. No idea what I'm talking about? "Discs" and suddenly it all becomes clear, but only because you have picked up a bit of that jargon along the way – you were never taught it in school.

Contrary to what might be thought of about imperial measurements, If anything I actually enjoy the opportunity to learn about what something means rather than being off putting and I suspect anyone else in the hobby also enjoys it. As they say it would be all quite boring if everything was the same.

The Americans also carry it on, and there are a number of times with these units and scales where I think "I actually find that more logical than ours."

Michael W

There's an interesting page on Metrication in the United States in Wikipedia.

Roger

Models of monorails have no gauge but they have a scale. An example of gauge versus scale is HO/OO. HO (half O ) has the same gauge track as the British OO but the scales are different. HO gauge have accurate proportions between the loco bodies and the track (1/87th scale). OO trains have bodies too big proportionally (1/76th) for the width of the track. This is because the UK manufacturers who embraced OO at its introduction after the war feared they couldn't source sufficiently small electric motors so they expanded the loco bodies instead.

Edited By Chris Trice on 12/02/2018 18:08:02

There's also EM, P4 and Scale4 which are all more or less OO to various levels of accuracy.

And my brother models in 00-9 which is narrow gauge to OO scale on N-gauge track >boggle<

Neil

No – I'm sure that Roman Chariots had wheels Brian…

IanT

Yes, my brother was MJT Scale Components. He used to produce white metal cast track shoes to make scale track along with brass etch kits. He also produced kits for teak coaches and components for the Nigel Gresley Society. He sold the business about ten years ago after twenty five years but it's still trading as MJT.