Noted author Mallory Hope Ferrell has produced an entire series of articles on “Thirty-Inch Gauge Railroads” in Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazzette. The series began with the July/August, 2005 issue in which he discussed the shay-powered Crescent Tramway once located in Park City, Utah… There have been quite a few articles in the series since. The majority of these lines were in the Western U.S. As mentioned, most of the On30 model equipment is patterned after 3’ gauge or 2’ gauge equipment and then fitted with 2 1/2’ gauge wheelsets.
If someone is interested in modifying some of this model equipment to match actual prototypes, the series of articles by Mal Ferrell provides many interesting examples.
I read Mal’s columns and they were (as always with his stuff) excellent reads and very informative. However, note that in the grand scheme of things, 30" railroading was only a miniscule fraction of US railroading. In fact IIRC there were more linear miles of 2’ gauge track built in the US than 30" gauge, and 2’ gauge was pretty small in miles of track compared to 3’ gauge.
One thing that should be discussed is that On30 may be very usefull gateway to O narrow gauge. The difference between On30 and On3 track gauge is only 1/8", and most if not all the Spectrum On30 stuff can be pretty easily converted. (I think some of the engines even come with instructions on how to do it?) Correct On30 and On3 track with proper tie placement etc. is available. So I could see someone using HO track (flextrack, sectional, or “click track” like Kato, Atlas or Bachmann) to make an On30 layout, and later removing the HO track and replacing it with On3 or On30 track with correct size and spacing of ties etc. Everything else (buildings, roads etc.) could stay as they were, just lay new track where the HO track had been.
It all depends on what you like. Standard gauge or Narrow Gauge? Narrow Gauge was never developed to compete with standard gauge. Thats what you made it sound like. Only the best locomotives can handle Narrow gauge like the SHAY!!! Long live the Narrow Gauge!!!
Narrow Gauge was actually built to save costs especially back in the 1880s when every little city/ town wanted rail service even if they had no industry or in some cases one large industry.
You see a lot of these small towns/ cities couldn’t woo the railroads to build through their small city/town or run a branch line to their town so,the more affluent citizens decided they will build their own railroad and sell stock and bonds to help finance their railroad…A lot of these small lines was heavily in debt,never turn a profit and was abandon within ten years…Some last just as long as their single source of revenue lasted and very few lasted until the '20s.
Actually this was a colorful time in the annuals of narrow gauge railroad history that is often overlooked unless one looks into the history of their State by doing research at the library by going through old microfilmed newspapers.
That was the selling point, that it would be substantially cheaper to build a narrow gauge line instead of a standard gauge line and you would get virtually the same benefits.
Unfortunately what the builders soon found out was that the grading costs were virtually the same and since many narrow gauge lines were built in more rugged and less desireable alignments, the increased costs due to the difficult alignment outweighed any savings. They also found that narrow gauge equipment was not substantially cheaper than standard gauge equipment because both types of equipment used essentially the same parts, and the cost to fabricate those parts was substanially the same. On the only savings was smaller amount of material required to acutally build the equipment which wasn’t sufficient to outweigh other costs and the reduced capacity of the equipment.
The final straw was that the equipment wasn’t able to interchange and thus had to be transferred at the junction. Not a big deal in the 1870’s when labor was very cheap and the concept of interchange was just taking hold. By 1900 interchange was widely accepted and so narrow gauge construction stopped. The only narrow gauge that survived after that was either in an isolated spot, served a very low volume or was dedicated to one industry and thus had no or minimal interchange.
Indeed…I have often thought of buying a On30 2-6-0 and say about 18-20 boxcars and a combine and haul veneer lumber from the finishing mill to the standard gauge trans loading area in roughly 1928/29 as a road in its final years as trucks encroach their livelihood…
Narrow Gauge is a niche market - in the United States. Looking across a couple of oceans, in South Africa and Japan 42 inch gauge was THE market - and narrow gauge started at 30 inch gauge and went down!
As for, “the best locomotives,” SAR had the Red Devil and some outstanding Garratts, the JNR ran C62 class 4-6-4s at speeds no shay could dream of (the record is just about 80mph) and the present crop of 42" gauge high-speed EMU sets can top 160kph.
In 30 inch gauge, the present-day example I model is the Kurobe Gorge Railway, built to provide logistic support for the hydropower complex in the aforementioned gorge, but also operated as a tourist railway to the numerous hot spring resorts along its route. (The alternatives for the tourists would be to hike in along mountain goat trails or to be lowered from a hovering helicopter.) The prototype has lots of rock tunnels, bridges that could support a Y6 and a unique but un-modelable underground slant-running elevator. OTOH, the rolling stock looks like something that escaped from an amusement park ride.
Taiwan had a rather extensive complex of 30 inch gauge routes along its east coast. I don’t know how much, if any, of that survives. It also has the Alishan Forest Railway, 30 inch gauge, once the stamping ground of a bunch of 18 and 28 ton sidewinders. One ‘feature’ was a real prototype spiral, three turns around Tzu-li-shan on a 4% uncompensated grade, with a figure eight at the top!
Funniest railroad thing I’ve ever seen was an 18-ton Alishan Shay with an empty boiler. With the unbalan
Since everybody has picked apart all the other scales, TT is the only one left, so here goes…
The way I heard it, TT was designed in the USA, in the 1930s, for English-measuring countries to avoid all the hassles with metric conversions, with a scale ratio of 1:120, giving a nice clean 1’ = 1/10", to make model-building easier. The track gauge was originally 15/32", real close to 12mm.
It is also, of course, “the perfect scale” halfway in between HO and N (which hadn’t even been thought of then), allowing just about twice as much railroad per unit area as HO. In the 1950s and 60s, it had some decent commercial support in the US, and because of the Soviet bloc, was the major scale in East Germany, where it still has major presence and commercial support (Roco among others), and there are still today many active TT clubs in the eastern half of Germany.
One thing that used to happen was a big railroad would refuse to build a branch to a town, but would agree to buy the line if the city built it themselves. So if you go back to the 1800’s in Minnesota you’ll see a lot of railroad charters with names like “Springfield & Northern Pacific” or “Cedarville and Great Northern” as the towns would get a railroad chartered to build the line from their town to a junction with the big RR, and the big RR would then buy or lease the line and operate it.
Youd be surprised where you can find narrow gauge too.I was looking for info for an On30 line when I had some more space.I found 3 of them in the Quad City area where I live.Heck the Moline and Southeastern even shows up in a google search, sadly no pictures and only the name nothing more ( sighs)
I still think about doing something in On30 but now its getting pricey ( oh well) but someday maybe my Midwestern Narrow Gauge line will be started.
