Why N Scale?

I know this opens the door to a lot of opinions but I'll post anyways. I currently model HO scale and with the way things seem to be shaping up I may very well end up not running a Ho scale layout for lack of space. I know I can always build a shelf layout but being the only run to run much less be interested in trains I doubt it would go over well in my home. So I have been doing some thinking and some video watching of N scale modeling. Its got my interest but is the right choice for me? Any other HO scale modelers turned N scale out there who can maybe shed some light?

 

Couplers are frustrating.
You miss the detail.
Sound is crappier.
Trains are longer.
More fits in the space.
Scenes are so, so big. SO BIG.
Switching is good, I haven't had problems.
Nothing is body mounted and it makes you want to go postal.
All in all, it all depends on what you want - And if you don't have the space for an HO layout then N scale is really the best option!

 

I've been in N the majority of my life even though my uncle that got me into it is HO and got me my first HO set for Christmas but something drew me to N. When I was a teenager I had a full basement to myself but opted for building one of the Atlas layouts out of their book. And even with starting with some crappy Bachmann engines I still stayed with it and when I bought my first Kato and ran it that was the beginning of the end. I'm totally a modern guy and love watching long trains run and twist and turn as it flows through the layout. I don't have a layout of my own at this point as I live in an apartment but do have a friend that I've helped for several years now with his old layout and now the new one we just built and run our trains for a couple shows a year. But when you watch a 100 car train pull up a hill and through some twists and turns there's nothing like it. To do that in HO you'd need a lot of square footage. There are some negatives as pointed out above but more manufactures are body mounting stuff and technology is getting better.

 

I'll give you my look. I never had to convert. Aside from a few months in junior high, I never fooled with HO.I have seen numerous HO layouts, including several that have been highly promoted in magazines, and the one thing that I always have felt was wrong is the proportion between the size of trains and the size of scenery. When the biggest tree is half again the height of a boxcar, that seems wrong. When a train is still in one town when it enters another, that's wrong. It's all about proportion.

 

Au contraire -- a lot of the models to come out in the past 5 years are body-mounted: BLMA has led the way on that one.

 

I converted 15 years ago. The other thing you have to get used to is that the selection in n scale can be limited vs what manufacturers do in HO.
Walthers is a prime example: new structure models are released annually in HO (or at least seems that way to me). In N scale, we're lucky to get old models re-released every so often and once in a blue moon we get a new model. Just about every multi-scale manufacturer produces new stuff in HO annually; it's not quite the same in n scale.
John

 

I will take a shot at replying even though I do NOT qualify as a former modeler in HO.
I selected n-scale in 1973 because we were living in married student housing; I was a grad student. We did not have
space for a home layout. I learned there was an n-scale club near the U of ILL campus.
I have always owned model trains, but n-scale and then Kadee now MTL took the experience
to a much different level. I could run longer (25+ car) trains with ease on the club layout.
I have had a home layout from 1975 forward to 2014. I think even though the selection
of items does not match HO, it is the best it has been since I re-entered the hobby.
These are various clubs for n-scale that do modular layouts such as table-top and n-track.
I model steam and find it very enjoyable in n-scale.

 

First and foremost, I am a modeler at heart. Whatever catches my fancy. I had a friend, years ago, thst collected N scale trains and was intrigued, When I dove in to model railroading, it was N scale because of my lack of usable space. Yes there are compromises, but that is part of what I have always liked about modeling. Finding ways to overcome the restrictions and make it work for, be it cosmetic, operational, or even artistic. Even the challange of searching for a piece that I want and has been long available fulfills those challenges that drive me. That is why I chose N scale.

Trey

 

"Sound is crappier" is probably a bit harsh, but as one Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott said frequently, "I can't change the laws of physics!" On the other hand, I get pretty rich sound out of my cell phone when using Sirius XM and iHeart radio, and how big could that speaker be?

I would add to the list that N Scale can be harder to find than HO Scale. HO still has the majority of the market share in Model Railroading (exact percentage estimates vary) so that's where a lot of attention and product is focused. That can be a bit frustrating although there is plenty of product out there.

Those of you who have been here a while already know my story: my late father bought each of his two sons an N Scale train set with the idea that it would keep our hands off of his HO layout. That didn't work as planned, but N has been my primary scale ever since. I too am drawn to the proportion of trains to scenery that is more possible in N than in HO.

 

I have run the gauntlet of scales since I was a lad in knickerbockers with curly hair and a cracker jack box. Started with three rail Lionel, got into some plastic model kit building especially sailing ships for awhile, then tried HO scale for awhile. Got into N scale in the early dark ages when things that smoked were usually the motors, not a smoke generator, mainly for the lack of space. Toyed for awhile with N narrow gauge using Z scale mechanisms and even thought about Z scale.

Gave up on the narrow gauge and Z scale mainly because of the costs involved and limited selection, and partly because the eyesight and manual dexterity took a hit. There are now much better locos than when I started in N and more different types and better cars. More track availability and you can be as high tech or low tech as you want. And one can have a simple point to point on a twenty inch wide shelf with enough scenery to overwhelm the loco running through it as it does in real life. Other pluses are that a 20 or 30 car train behind two GP7s winding through the scenery doesn't need a humongous amount of space and with the advent of N trak one can have a portable modular layout that can move with you and still have that overwhelming scenery and all built on 3 and 4 foot sections that are not much more than 30 inches wide.

 

Though I have not built a "switching layout", the test loop with turntable I currently have in my home office is similar in scope.
A switching layout in n-scale could be enjoyable in terms of working a locomotive and cars within a yard. This could be done
as a shelf layout.
I have two Bachmann 2-8-0s on track now; I had sound and dcc installed and find it enjoyable to shift short strings of cars about the test loop which has one two-track stub end siding.

 

This pretty much sums it up for me. It is accentuated by my 'tunnel vision' as I can only see about 3' across at a 6' distance.
Some day I will move to 'G' scale when my vision fails.

 

I like long trains and big yards, so N it is, ever since 1990 when it became as reliable as HO. As far as yards, I have a 30" deep shelf and a 20 track yard. In HO, it would be 14 or so, not big enough to suggest a large classification yard or long enough trains (IMHO it takes about 30 cars to start looking real)

 

I started at G, went down to HO as a teen and built many an empire on the floor, then went to N because I wanted an operations-focused layout. I packed up the N this weekend though because I had a bad run of luck with locomotives and I'm sick of fiddling with things. I've bounced back up to HO, built an Inglenook on the flip side of the HCD my N scale layout was on, and am much happier. I've got everything boxed up safely though, for when I want to come back.

 

Started in HO as a kid with the usual Tyco set of my era. Stayedmwith that scale through my teens and when I came back to the hobby in the 90's I fiddled with it still. But mostly buiding and painting for others and with the local club layout.

That being said, I imagineered an N layout in my teens, wishing for the better scenery to train ratio whiole realizing that to get the same ratio in HO would require John Allen resources. So when I started to move into the hobby again in the 90's, N tugged and pulled. I finally got a deal on a built up layout complete with locos and such. It was a 3x4.5 that needed a lot of help. The hook was set! Even then with Lifi-like and Bachman toy F units, that layout gave me and my family and many others at a couple of train shows a lot of pleasure.

All of the newer stuff I have collected has been reliable and pulls well. And it is all steam!

N it is until these eyes and hands just cain't do it anymore. So, welcome to the hobby, and enjoy it for what gives you the most fun!

 

As a child, I started out with my dad's S scale American Flyer two-rail trains set up on the living room floor. We graduated to HO scale as I got older and we built a couple of 4X8 HO layouts that taught both of us a lot, but mainly gave us lots of time together to bond as father and son.

I started buying and reading Model Railroader magazine sometimes in the late 50's early 60's and I was inspired and amazed by the model railroads being built by the likes of John Allen.

The family moved, and I was now a teenager and I stopped model railroading and started building ship models, although I kept reading and collecting MR even through high school, college, a four year hitch in the USN and later as I went to school and worked in the aerospace industry as a graphics/technical artist and model builder.

Some time in the late 70's I was in a mall when I spotted a model train setup in an empty store. It was the local Ntrak club who had negotiated a free space to set up their modules and work on them in between shows. I was not aware of what Ntrak was, or that there were model train shows three times a year in Utah...but I was fascinated by the length of run, the long trains, the versatility of the modular concept and the comraderie. I got hooked.

In building my first modules, I immediately wanted to make something that looked "real" and I found out that N-scale let me do that much easier than any of the larger scales. The same scene I was doing, which was 4' deep would have been nearly 8' deep in HO scale which would have been practically impossible!

Since I was already a pro industrial model builder, and had been reading MR regularly since I was a kid, model railroading was not totally "new" to me, but there were certain revelations that came to me as I delved deeper into N-scale.

First (obviously) was the scenery to track ratio. There's just something about the size of N-scale trains and the practically applicable amount of scenery that surrounds them that looks more "right" than any other scale, including Z-scale. Much smaller and the details go away...much bigger and the stage becomes markedly smaller. N-scale is "IT" as far as scenery-to-track is concerned.

Second, I discovered that an 18" radius in N-scale looked like a 36" radius in HO scale! WOW! That meant that the Ntrak 24" minimum radius REALLY made long engines and cars look and operate "right". It equals out to essentially "twice as big" in the same space as HO.

Third, I discovered that making my own turnouts was just the same in N-scale as in HO, but they cost half of what they did in HO since they used half the material. The same difficulty but half the cost....this is GOOD. Remember, that when I got into it, there were no commercially available RTR turnouts in code 55, so because I wanted to do code 55 on my industrial sidings, I had to build my own turnouts. No biggee.

Fourth, I discovered Kadee N-scaled cars along with their couplers, which made a HUGE difference in the appearance of trains as opposed to the common Rapido couplers. We used transition cars with a Rapido coupler on one end and a Kadee on the other as we converted our rolling stock to Kadees.

Okay...there were downsides of N-scale at the time that have been taken care of mostly such as lo-pro wheelsets are now readily available and are stock items on many engines and cars (I started turning mine down using my lathe before there were any lo-pro wheelsets commercially available), highly detailed cars had to be either scratch-built or kitbashed but nowadays there are many cars that come essentially superdetailed and RTR. Now there are code 55 turnouts available from two manufacturers even though I wish the turnout selection was better which is why I continue to make my own. Back then, if you wanted a well-detailed engine you had to buy brass. Even then, brass engines sometimes weren't all that well-detailed, but some were very well done. With a little work, they'd run okay too. Nowadays there is a plethora of engines which are well-detailed, prototype specific and will be available for some time out there. Obscure one-offs are also available as well as popular engines and cars. Sure, there aren't as many as in HO, but today is N-scale nirvana compared to what it was in the 70's and 80's.

I've operated on plenty of layouts in both N-scale and HO scale and my experience has been that the well built N-scale layouts operate better than the well-built HO layouts. The cars run better in N, the couplers are more reliable in N and are easier to uncouple using an uncoupling tool such as a martini toothpick or a Rix Pick. You can run longer trains between stops and now there's not a problem installing DCC and sound in just about anything. If you want to do Nn3 it's getting easier and easier to do it and I have several friends who are filling their basements with Nn3 layouts. If the speakers are installed correctly, N-scale DCC with sound is just as good as HO.

However, one of the "problems" with N-scale is that if you want to fill up a big layout with cars and engines, N-scale costs more, because you can fit twice as many cars and engines into the same space as HO. I don't know if that's really a "problem" but it is true. However, for small layouts, N-scale costs a lot less than HO...which is good.

I never have regrets or aspirations to someday convert to a larger scale. N-scale is IT for me.

Lastly, here's a photo of one of my old Ntrak modules and illustrates the main reasons I choose N-scale...


Cheerio!
Bob Gilmore

 

I have to confess I am a newby for Model railway but not to 1/72, 1/76 ammd N, 1/144. I was a convert to 1/144 before starting N gauge railways. Nowdays 1/144, N has as much detail as older 1/72 models. You only have to look at old Airfix tanls vs new 1/144 tanks. Reliability is good in my experience at N and Digital is cheap. The other and growing gain for N, is access to 3D printed items. Unique low production is affordable at N. Its a long way off at HO. N will grow as 3D printing goes widespead. I did my own "buffers" not sure what that is in US termes. Look in the T track pictures under me. Its the growing scale wher scenary is important and the scope for new items is wider with access to 3D prints for anything from buffres to new bodies.

 

I'm moving the other way. I have been in N for 15 years. I am now modeling in On30. I like modeling in the larger scale. I am becoming a modeler. In N I was more of an operator. I did some modeling, but mostly I accumulated massive amounts of cars and quite a few locos.

I don't accumulate as much in On30. In N, if Intermountain came out with 12 numbers of a SP box Car, I had to have all 12 numbers.

Still having fun. I saw a massive Free Mo N Scale layout at a trishaw last weekend. It was very impressive. Made me glad I kept enough N to run some long trains.