Probably not Bernie (the OP) who came and went 2 years ago after starting this thread 3 years ago. [xx(]
Rich
Ah, yet another necro topic. [W]
I found the title, as is often the case here, a bit weird and confusing.
“HO vs HO visual comparison”
At plain reading it makes not sense. Modus operandi. [:o)]
My intent by such mention wasn’t to offer it as a substitute for scale, per se, but to offer that it’s a potential source for in-scene people. The caveat that YMMV is a foregone conclusion: there’s a chance that it wouldn’t work at all, but there’s a very good chance that it might – and because of the latter, I felt it was worth mentioning as a potential starting point.
Ostensibly, 20mm includes “human” characters and “sci-fi” characters, being not exclusively devoted to wargaming; I can imagine some of the fantasy characters would look at home on the sidewalks of NYC, or Sacremento or LA, or Vegas or NOLA, etc. Plus, soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines travel alongside civilians.
If you’re somewhere that you have access to these things, where you can physically handle them and do a comparison and contrast – then I think someone who’s already looking at mixing scales (HO and HOj) owes it to himself or herself, to at least take a look-see and decide for himself or herself whether the figures will work in the projected layout environment.
From what I understand, the only other alternatives available to the OP were both unacceptable; the first of the two options being to abandon the idea altogether, and the second being to scratch-build the desired rolling stock.
Granted, the latter of those options would allow the use of off-the-shelf HO figures (which may or may not be “closer to scale” than an out-of-scale alternative), but that potential advantage was rendered moot when the OP indicated a build “from scratch” wasn’t acceptable.
they were listed as “wargaming scales” (or words to that effect) in a Wikipedia list of modeling scales. yeah, I know: “Wikipedia” – but I think it falls within popular usage/understanding of the concept, respecting miniatures.