S is best!!! any S gaugers out there? If you use a command system is it TMCC or DCC?
You betcha! There are several of us S gaugers out there! I am a former HO person who is loving S. The selection has never been better and I am loving the scratch building aspect in a larger scale. I don’t use DCC so no help there, but welcome to the wonderful world of S scale.
Randy
I am working on prepareing my basement for a 0 and S combined layout. I am a die hard S gauger with a serious O gauge habit. I like them both.
Totally S gauge American Flyer
Jim
I have some S Gauge but I am not running TMCC or DCS on my layout as yet but the TMCC or DCS should work for A.C. powered S Gauge, don’t know about the older A.C. Gilbert switches & TMCC. If you have D.C. powered stuff I would think that the H.O. command control system would work better or the two rail O Gauge stuff as two railers use D.C. power more often.
Lee F.
I am, on the scale side as opposed to the American Flyer side. Currently, I have DC, but am moving to DCC shortly.
Enjoy
Paul
S gauge track has only two rails and looks kind of naked.
We have almost as many choices of track as does O gauge. American models uses code .148 rail in there track and looks like ho track except every so many ties one is whopperjawed giving an illusion that it is hand laid and not sectional track Shelper has a track system that has built in roadbed and there is also gargraves S gauge track.
I am going with gargraves as the two gauges will look like they belong to each other in apperence.
Well, to my eyes, three-rail track looks pretty crowded. [swg]
It’s been S for me since I got my first American Flyer set in 1951. I have a ton of A.C. Gilbert Flyer, Flyonel and also own/run a large collection from S-Helper Service (Showcase Line), American Models, American Hi-Rail, K-Line, Putt Trains, and River Raisin. I do run some things on TMCC.
I run S and O gauge together on my layout. I’m into the vintage stuff, so I run everything the conventional way. Besides a lot of American Flyer trains and accessories, I also have S gauge tinplate trains made in Japan, East Germany and Italy.
How about some pictures of these tin plateS trains from over seas??? They sound cool.
I had S scale as a kid along with Lionel. Had to shovel a lot of sidewalks to get money for the used sets. I’m glad to see there’s FINALLY an interest in S scale on this forum.
I have a two tracks of S Gauge inside my O gauge layout and I am using mainly GarGraves track with three American Flyer switches and one S Helper switch. GarGraves and A.F. and K-Line track join together without any adapter pins. Also have four A.F. steam locomotives(one is a 295 A.F., one is a 283 A.F. 4-6-2 wheel set), the other two not worth mentioning and some 1957 rolling stock by A.F. Bought some S Gauge rolling stock made by K-Line and I am not as impressed with K-Line as the older A.F, seems to me that K-Line did not keep to S Scale in the rolling stock sizing as a K-Line caboose keeps hitting everything do to excessive hangover.
Lee Fritz
Unfortunately, I don’t have a digital camera to share pictures of my trains, but I’ll see what I can find on the net.
The Japanese S gauge trains are actually very easy to find over here, as they were made almost exclusively for export. They date from the 1960’s, when the North American market was literally flooded with Japanese-made toys. There were many train sets made in Japan, but the only S gauge ones were made by a company called Dakin. The most common sets are freight sets pulled by a battery operated B&O F unit. They came in various sizes, the largest having 7 cars: flatcar with logs, NYC gondola, B&O hopper car, ATSF boxcar, UP cattle car, Texaco tank car and B&O caboose. They also made one set that included a dummy engine. All the pieces are very nicely lithograpphed and these sets are extremely attractive, the only criticism I have being that the nose on the engine looks rather squished in. Interestingly, the boxes for these train sets state that they are standard gauge!
The only picture I could find on the net of these is the one at the top of this page, which features the engine, boxcar, gondola and tank car mixed in with other trains: http://www.hagurumaya.jp/omake2.html These do show up on ebay quite frequently, though, but there don’t seem to be any on at the moment.
Earlier, Dakin made passenger sets. Unlike the freight sets, which you find all the time, the passenger trains are quite hard to c
Thanks for the info on foreign S gauge that was cool.[8D]
Lets keep this S gauge thread alive and well.
If you have not checked out http://www.S-trains.com then you should for links to everything S.
Some of the Japanese stuff did it have three rail track???
S is popular in newzeland in the form of narrow gauge railroading.
There’s also S discussion at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Trains/messages. This is one of the older and probably the best S forums on the web. It has over 1300 members.
I wonder how many members here run or collect S gauge. We may be the minority, but we’re all diehards and very proud.
no, it didn’t. The picture on that wesite I found shows the S gauge items mixed in with O gauge 3-rail trains. The Dakin S gauge trains ran on C batteries placed directly in the locomotive, so the track was 2-rail. While there were maufacturers in Japan making better-quality electric trains like the others shown in the picture (the majority of which were sold to their home market), the Dakin trains are more of the toy variety (the majority of which were exported to the West). Dakin was one of numerous Japanese toy makers (other examples include Yonezawa, Alps, Haji, Masudaya/Modern Toys, bandai, Toy nomura and Marusan) who made battery operated train sets (either with the batteries in the engine or else a transformer-like box that sent power to the track). These sets were made in many gauges icluding Japanese O gauge (a gauge in between O and S used by modelers in Japan), HO, regular O or else sometimes a completely made-up gauge, S gauge being limited to the examples I metioned. For all of these companies, the train sets (which, by the way, were almost always sold only as sets) were only one part of a product line that included all kinds of toys. These were most common in the 1960’s. However, by the mid-late 1970’s the majority of these compaies had disappeared.
I’m extremely interested in these battery operated Japanese tinplate trains and have many in my collection. The Dakin S gauge freight sets are among the easiest of these sets to find and it was actually one of these sets which was my first exposure to Japanese tinplate.
Doing more searching, I was able find an engine body and a rusty boxcar on ebay Australia, so you can see this train in colour:
I have collected “S” gauge in the past,still have certain items.But I do collect American Flyer “O” gauge when I run across it.[;)]
The k-line caboose is an 0-27 body on s gauge wheels, I have the L&N boxcar and it is tid bit bigger than flyer but still looks good with flyer equipment. K-line did at least come up with a decent s gauge truck for their rolling stock. I think that had K-line survived they may have come up with new tooling for the S gauge line.