know some of you at Atlas and other manufactures must tire of hearing that N scale will over come HO and be a dominant scale. Well my hunch is that won’t happen - or if it does - it won’t be for a long time to come. But I do believe it is going to grow much larger in representation. Here’s why.
As you are well aware, HO is probably THE scale to be in for the diesel/steam transition era. The scale is a good one to show of the detail of steam and bring in early diesels. Trains in those days were shorter and the average length of trains in HO reflect the average larger layouts in basements and garages around North America.
I would say that S scale is probably the best scale for narrow gauge. The narrow gauge engine in S approaches HO in appearance and size, so details can dominate. Even though S in a larger scale, with shorter narrow gauge trains, the lengths of trains (in feet) again approximates HO.
But what of today’s modern era; the era with SD60’s, 70’s, 90’s, and ACW’s, etc. And how about modern era freight car, intermodal, automax’s, centre beam cars lengths. A modern centre beam car in N is almost the same length as a 40 foot box car in HO.
And we N scalers want longer trains to reflect the longer prototypical trains. So in 8 feet, I can have an SD90 pulling 24 or so 50 foot ore cars. A larger (in terms of N scale) layout can handle the contemporary engines and cars much better than in HO. I always like to say how funny many basement HO layouts would look with a double header of SD90’s pulling AutoMax cars; heck a 12 foot length train in HO would only have two engines and about 10 cars - it would look out of place.
So I maintain that N will be the dominate scale in contemporary equipment. Heck I’m always telling HO guys who make the switch to N to model contemporary; this will stop the shock of the toy like appearance of some of the smaller rolling stock from the transition era in N.
Now I don’t expect this dominance