Recently I was watching a History Channel video about model railroading. It focused on the history of our great hobby. It showed that Lionel, Marx, American Flyer and Marklin were the forerunners of MR. Towards the end of the video it mentioned how HO scale came about and that it’s popularity grew fast. Question: what companies were the forerunners of HO scale?
Well I dont know for sure but I do know that Tyco, Atlas and Athearn made HO scale pretty big in the 70s and 80s. Athearn Atlas and Walthers are today the biggest HO scale companies that are keeping this great hobby alive and well today.
Eric LaNal (Allan Lake Rice) was in at the great HO vs OO debate that HO finally won.
He also produced kits.
Gordon Varney was one of the earliest manufacturers. His 0-4-0T Dockside probably launched more HO model railroads than any three other locomotives.
Lionel built their famous die-cast scale Hudson in HO as well as O.
Strombecker produced HO scale car kits with paper sides, wooden wheels (!) and staples for grab irons.
Mantua Metal Products (Later Tyco) was also an early player. In addition to locomotive and car kits, they produced one of the first automatic couplers for HO. It was seriously ugly (something like a horizontal tennis racket frame on each car end) but it did work.
Just a very incomplete list from memory. I’m sure other old-timers can add to it.
Chuck
My first HO cars in the 40’s were Varney and my engine was English, the Yard Bird.
Mantua (Tyco ready to run), English, Penn Line (current Bowser line), Globe ( Athearn F7 that first sold for $2.00), Howell Day, MDC, and none of it you would want today with the exception of the Penn Line engines.
what about AHM?
AHM was prominent in the mid 1970s but I don’t remember them going back much earlier than that.
TYCO was one of the big players. I still have a few pieces of their early rolling stock on my layout, with replacement metal wheels of course! [:D]
-Brandon
Had a Penn Line Santa Fe Chief as a kid…
To get the history straight, one has to understand that while there is indeed a direct line of descent in the hobby from tinplate Lionel, Flyer and Marx , it is through O gauge, not HO. O gauge trains in scale, highrail, and pure tinplate forms existed concurrently in the adult sector of the hobby for decades. In fact, right down to today.
However, HO came out of England in the 1920’s, only roundaboutly derived from a short-lived table-top toy. When some examples made it accross “the pond”, scale superstructures were applied to the mechanisms and these roughly 1:87 oddities rather quickly became “serious” scale models with a large following. In the U.S. this was mainly through the efforts of Allan Lake Rice (Eric LaNal). The story in Great Britain was somewhat similar. Flyer did produce some HO just prior to the war but these were generally considered to be scale items, not a toys.
There were no really comparable tinplate or actual toy-quality versions of HO until the 1950’s, when Lionel, Flyer and Marx briefly produced them. Rather like tinplate O and S, very inexpensive N gauge sets were sold for quite a few years as toys in the U.S. before becoming a legitimate “scale” item.
So…HO may be considered to hold a rather unique position among the model train scales, shared only perhaps by all but extinct TT and highly limited Z. HO essentially came into being as a scale model created for serious adult hobbyists, not from a toy intended for youngsters.
As for early manufacturers, how about Mantua Metal Products (TYCO didn’t come along for decades after that), M. Dale Newton, Megow, Lobaugh, Comet, Scale-Craft, and Icken, to name just a few.
CNJ831
I’m holding a June 1944 MR,about 46 pages, smaller format.a Varney ad mentions
their models, like the 2-8-8-4, but they are making screws for the war effort.
Athearn is in it as well as Mantua. Red Ball is there.
Not a whole lot of selection, but recall during this time its more a scratchbuilders paradise with kits. Athearn is very new at this time and just gearing up.
Just a garage like operation you might say.
But there is plenty of parts to buy and the mag has construction articles and plans.
By comparison we have so many RTR stuff you can just buy off the shelf.
1947 mag shows a lot more available HO with manufacturers you wouldnt know today.
Lionel, Marx, American Flyer and Marklin however dont even show in this Mag.
Model railroading goes much further back than this
Ives goes back further with standard gauge toy trains.
The perspective from this side of the pond…
Rich Victorians built 15" gauge “toy trains”… the Duffield Bank Railway… in fact Mr Heywood was making a serious point about small sized/low cost railways but “Gentlemen” didn’t get their hands dirty.
Theory says that the first specifically model gauges were Gauge 2 and gauge 1. I’ve never seen any evidence for Gauge 2. Above gauge 1 is usually the model engineering sizes such as 2 1/4 inch gauge.
Gauge 1 was 3/8" = 1’ (1/32)
This became 10mm = 1’ at an unknown date
0 (that’s naught) gauge started as 1/4" = 1’ – which 0 Scale (1/48) still is.
Sometime between 1900 and 1910 someone saw the potential toy train market and looked around for someone to make it. The people that were big in making toys were the Germans. So that’s who they went to. An equally unknown person told the German model/toy makers that 7mm was near enough to 1/4" so we ended up with 0 Gauge
0 gauge is 1:43 – 7mm = 1’ on 32mm gauge track… which is WRONG.
The next step (before 1939) was Half Naught… H0… 3.5mm = 1’ – 1:87.
Europe and the USA stuck with the ratio of 1:87 running it on 16.5mm gauge track… more or less correct.
Post WW2 someone (again unknown) rationalised 3.5mm = 1’ to 4mm = 1’ which makes life easier because 1mm = 3"… this gives 1:72.
They kept it on 16.5 track which is miles out.
next “logical” step was to go one step smaller… 3mm = 1’… which as a trade gimmick was called Table Top or TT… it runs on 12mm gauge track… which is as accurate as 4mm on 16.5.
I think that someone in Europe produced a metric equivalent of some kind using 10.5mm gauge.
Someone had to go smaller so we got 2mm which got called N Gauge (Nuts?)
Someone else came up with Z…
I have heard of Q in the USA but don’t know anything about it.
All the while a select band on both sides of the Atlantic had halved gauge 1 and produced…S Gauge. 3/16" = 1’. The S is said to stand for "sixtee
Thank you David. Most informative and consise. [bow] J.R.
Gauge 2 is 51mm track. Manufactured by Marklin and a few other companies. I do own one Gauge 2 car…a three axel passenger coach. Looking for more. [:)]
underworld
aka The Violet
[:D][:D][:D][:D][:D]
David: Just as 4mm modellers noticed that 16.5mm track was narrow, O gauge modellers saw that 1.25" gauge in .25" scale was a prototype 60" (5 feet even). There were two responses to this (aside from “so wot?”) Increase the scale and keep the gauge – 17/64" to the foot. Shrink the gauge to 1 3/16" on 1/4" scale - prototype gauge 4’ 9". The latter is Q gauge. I don’t remember seeing either of them
I finally saw Lionel OO gauge. (I think this was there prewar scale, not HO). If you want to confuse your P4/S4 friends, Lionel OO (and American OO) was 19mm.
David:
TT scale in North America is 1/10" to the foot on somethng like .471" gauge.
They were actually around in the mid 60’s, maybe earlier but that would be before my time. At the time they were a Philadelphia based importer, primarily of Rivarossi of Italy. I still have an AHM SP Cab Forward model I bought in 1968.
In fact, AHM’s major supplier was apparently Polk Hobbies of NYC. It was the Polk brothers who first established contacts with Rivarossi to import and sell their HO items in the United States (along with the products of other European manufacturers). The Polks likwise were among the first to bring in a regular line of brass and die cast HO items from the Orient. Many of these products were also retailed through AHM and HO Train Company (both of Philly).
Sold mainly under their Aristo-Craft Distinctive Miniatures name, the Polks’ wide selection of products was probably second only to Walthers at the time and the majority of the items were only available from the Polks.
CNJ831
I remember lionel had 000 gauge back in the mid 40’s. To this day I’m not so sure what scale that was.
Actually, Felix, Lionel offered a limited line of OO gauge (1:76 scale) trains just before the war, including a OO version of their famous O gauge NYC Hudson. These were not revived after the war. Lionel never made OOO.
OOO trains, called treble-o gauge (1:148 scale) didn’t come along until the 1950’s and were initially offered in the United States by Lone Star, if my memory serves. Treble-O was was overtaken by N gauge (1:160 scale) about a decade later.
CNJ831