So the question comes up, what scale is your railroad? Well, it's "F". F??? What is F?? There is a scale called "F"???
So its a story. In the early days of miniature railroads, modelers were concerned with track gauges. They wanted standard gauges of track. So their models could run on many model railroads. They were less interested in scale. They could build their model to any scale, as long as it ran on a standard gauge track.
Where it became complicated is with "standard" gauge prototypes. They were built to 4 feet 8 1/2 inches in gauge. WHY??? Well it seems, and there are many stories, the in the beginning in about 1800 trains were mostly built to five-foot gauge. BUT the problem is that there were different ways to measure that. Many measured from the center of the rail to the center of the opposing rail. The huge problem there was if you changed the size of the rail you also changed the real gauge, the space between the rails. Many measured their gauge from the inside of one rail to the inside of the other to solve this problem. But that made their five-foot gauge wider that the other railroad's five-foot gauge. At length, it was decided to measure the gauge at the inside edge of the rails, but keep the gauge of the five-foot railways which was five feet center to center. The inside edges of that gauge were four feet, eight and one-half inches. And so that became the "standard" gauge mostly around the world over time.
Enter the modelers. Now figuring out scales for a miniature railway where the standard miniature gauge is say, one and three-quarters of an inch and the prototype has a gauge of four feet, eight and one-half inches, well the scale comes out very odd. So they decided to use five feet as the standard prototype gauge to keep the math simple. That same one and three-quarters of an inch becomes 1:32 scale. Simple. But many modelers hated the compromise.
NOW enter narrow-gauge Prototypes that are say, meter gauge, or three-foot gauge. IF you want your meter gauge train to run on that same one and three-quarters inch gauge track, the scale needs to be 1:22.5 scale. (G scale) or if you want to run the three-foot gauge prototypes on that same #1 gauge track, that's 1:20.3 scale. OR, "F" Scale. See Simple... or not...
3 окт 2024
