I was just reading about the 1940s and 1950s model railroading in a previous post. Interesting and it raised some questions in my mind. I wondered when HO became common. About what time period could you buy a locomotive that ran o.k. out of the box? I was born in 1964, so my first model railroad memories are mostly from the 1970s. When did knuckle couplers become comonly available in HO? I guess none of these are really important questions but it helps put things into perspective.
My model railroad history is that as a kid in the mid 1970s I had trains and loved them. Didn’t have much adult help with this. As I became a teen, I sold my trains to spend money on things like my first stereo and such. When I was in college I walked into Hobbyland and bought one Nscale ore hopper as a commitment to the future. I’d keep it on a shelf where I could see it. From the moment I was back around trains, the obsession came roaring back. I vowed that as soon as I graduated from college and got my first real job, I would start back into model railroading. Well, in 1989 I graduated and got my first adult job. I was back into model railroading.
I hope I haven’t bored anyone too much. I find people’s personal history with model trains interesting. I also am interested in the evolution of model trains. If you want to share your memories, I’d enjoy reading them.
I can pinpoint the moment (well…maybe not the exact date) when I was changed from an ex-Lionel Kid to a scale model railroader: In the middle of the summer of 1966, when I was at the LHS in Farmington, MI to add to my collection of Roco Minitanks military models, I spied the August 1966 issue of RMC and glanced thru it. That’s when I discovered that trains are something “even adults did.” I bought the magazine and began dreaming about what my first layout would look like…
Would that be Joes Hobby in Farminton Michigan?? It’s one of the few surviving shops in the area…
HO really began to pick up steam sometime in the 50s. MR use to publish polls as to the number of people in each scale… I don’t have the numbers in front of me but as small motors became better ( relatively speaking), kits became more readily available, disposable income was there, people began to gravitate to HO, much like what’s happening with N scale right now. Naturally, those magazine polls are based only on who answers them so take the above with that in mind. I don’t think that the likes of John Allen and company did HO any dis-service with thier writings on the subject either…
There was probably British HO back in the late 1920s (even OOO, somewhat close to today’s N) from craftsmen who enjoyed the challenge. There were commercial more or less ready to run HO engines by the late 1930s and early 1940s but while the prices seem reasonable to us they were high at the time. But even by the 1940s HO had grown very rapidly in popularity, but some was third rail, some was 6 volt versus 12 volt, NMRA standards were not yet in place.
I think a good practical date for HO as we more or less know it today was around 1956 or so, when Athearn, Mantua, Varney, Penn Line, HobbyLine, and others had RTR plastic engines and cars, there was prefab track with turnouts and power packs ready to hook up, structure kits, etc.
Dave Nelson
I don’t know when it started, but it was popular when I started in 1948. There are lots of adds in the 46, MRR. It has to be pre-war, though there were more O than HO in the 46 issues. I also have a Walthers Cat from then with a lot of HO stuff.
Thanks Dave. That is what I was wondering. I know things happen gradually so an exact date is not going to exist. In my mind, Nscale became far more reliable when companies like Atlas and Kato began putting flywheel drives in their locomotives back in the early nineties (I think). With the introduction of the Kato Mikado, it seems that Nscale crossed another major hurdle. Before Kato’s release of their Mikado, I had all but given up on Nscale steam. Rapido couplers used to be the norm but now knuckle couplers are becoming the norm. I’m not sure about low profile wheels and Code 55 track. I still use the old code 100 and wheels with standard flanges. Hey, they work for me and I’ve always been happy with them. Sure, I can tell that both are oversized but it just doesn’t bother me. Well, enough rambling for now!
I have been in HO since about 1957 or 58 when my parents gave us HO scale Marx train sets for Christmas, along with a layout my dad built. The Kadee magnetic coupler came along in the late 50’s, although I was not aware of them until about 1962, when the teenager who worked at the LHS (Meyers Hobby Shop, Grand Rapids MI) told us that these were the coolest couplers around. For many years I had a partially converted fleet, using a “conversion car” to couple the Kadee part of the train to the horn hook part.
I have the impression that if HO didn’t pass O before WWII, the stage was set by manufacturers like Mantua, Varney and Roundhouse, who all began operations in the late 1930’s. Following 1946, HO was the dominant scale. Athearn came along after the war, and was at first an O scale manufacturer. Plastic RTR trains seem to have become available about 1955, along with snap track.
My first experience with HO came around 1963 when my parents gave my older brother & me a Marx train set …came complete with a plastic molded “train board” that was about 4 X 6 complete with mountains & tunnel…had a 0-4-0 tank steamer , a boxcar. an Autocarrier ( with 4 cars) a tankcar & MOW caboose. I believe it even came with some unpainted people. I still have all of the rolling stock & the engine.
Jeff, I can assure you that it wasn’t “Joes” - because I remember when a friend and I went to the owner’s widow’s house and were allowed to pick-over all the remaining Roco Minitanks inventory for [virtually] free [:p] after the shop got closed down. [The train-related inventory got sold off much earlier].
I haven’t been to that area for nearly 40 years now…
HO really started growing right after WWII. By the mid-50’s it was the most popular scale. Myself, I am 56 and got stated with HO in the early 60’s. I had American Flyer and Lionel, but a Mantua/Tyco ‘General’ train set in HO was my first introduction to scale model railroading(maybe 1963, as the Civil War Centenial was going on then). My father was a ‘buy up clearance stuff after Christmas’ type of person and I wound up with a Lionel FA-1train set, a Revell F7 train set and a Varney ‘Little Joe’ train set in short order. By 1966 I started my first ‘permanant’ layout(MR PH&C trackplan, somewhat expanded). That layout was later replaced in my parents home when I got back from Vietnam(1972) with a larger handlaid code 70 layout. I was sort of ‘layout-less’ for a number of year, and then started the current layout(1987) in a 25’ by 20’ area dedicated to my trains.
I guess I may have been unlucky. I began in HO in the late 50’s. Lacking the proper tools, knowledge, etc. I had to depend on an engine to run smoothly out of the box.
Having Athearn rubber band driven engines, some small Aristo-Craft steamers, some Mantua steam and diesel, some Athearn blue box engines with the ‘sintered metal wheels’ which were junk, and a number of cheap engines I was essentially building non operating dioramas. I did not find an out ot the box excellent runner until Atlas came out with the Roco engines (FP-7, GP-38, SD-24’s) of the mid to late 70’s.
Where to start? I suppose with engine kits from Hobbytown of Boston and Penn-Line…These would take days to build because all of the filing and fitting you had to do.Then there was the Hobbytown drive for the Athearn GP7 so,we was keep fairly busy building kits.Of course there was Athearn and Roundhouse for easy to build car kits or “quickie” kits as some called them.
Why quickie kits? Simply because you could build these kits faster then the wooden car kits that was common in the 50s and 60s.Of course there was the smooth running brass steam engines that ran smooth from the box and was highly detailed to boot! The Tenshodo GP7 and F9 was also good units with fair detail.
Then the 60s burst into the scene and along with the 60s came the 8 wheel Athearn drive-smooth from the box and superior to the KMT drives found in Brass diesels from Alco Models,Trains Inc,Hallmark and other such companies.
Then there was N Scale by Atlas and everybody including the magazines laugh and made JOKES about those “tiny” trains and how nobody could seriously model in that small scale…[:0]
around age 4 or 5 (1958 or 59) i got an O guage 3 rail set for xmas . i don’t think it was lionel but i don’t remember what it was . played with that a lot for a few years , toys were scarce around our house in those days .
my brother got an HO set for xmas around 1965-66 made by triang-hornby i think . it was left at our house while the family travelled for a couple of years following my dad’s job around (to phoenix arizona for training courses then to montreal quebec where he installed and maintained the computer in the General Electric pavillion at Expo 67 that kept track of the numbers of visitors to the event etc.)
while in phoenix we got bitten by the HO slot car craze , eventually when we returned home we added a grade crossing track and got to have both hobbies set up at once [:)]
sometime around this point the O set was given to a younger boy down the street . yeah i kick myself for going along with that decision now !
after high school and into my first job (1975-76) i was at one of those xmas displays at eaton’s that was discussed in another thread and saw my first N guage set , well i bought that right away . never did get beyond the big oval around a piece of plywood stage . i did buy a few extra cars , and a nice steam engine , 2-8-2 if i recall . in an interesting reversal of the usual events i gave that set to my dad when i moved out of the family home to get married . he still has it but as far as i know has never run it . he’s retired now and maybe someday he’ll get to it .
i started buying HO equipment sometime in the late 80’s , not much , an engine kit one year , some car kits a couple years later etc , until early this year when i decided it was time to stop reading the magazines and actually do something with this hobby . well i’m a slow starter so the layout won’t actually get started until next year , but i’ve been buying lots of stuff , and i’ve started a couple of kits , so i feel i’m making progress . i’ve spent a lot of time this year r