Could you place HO scale trucks on a HOn3 caboose. Or would the size diff look to goofy? Like this one.
Mike
No.
I do not think it would look right. I have seen old time photos of the 1800’s when a few standard gauge roads would put their trucks on NG, rolling stock because of the different track gauges at the time and it did look odd. Measure a pair of HO scale trucks and measure the caboose.
Bitter Creek has a good selection of trucks that are metal frames.
Rich
Standard gauge is 56.5" and n3 is 36" so the difference is 20.5".
Yes, it would look really goofy. The wheels would stick out beyond sides of the car. Now the opposite happened in real life. A railroad would take a standard gauge car and put narrow gauge trucks under it. Still looks goofy but it works.
But if I am reading the unwritten question properly, I would think you could find a similar caboose in standard gauge instead of worrying about chainging this one. Or it looks like a fairly easy scratch build.
I just did a Google search for HO scale logging caboose and found a four wheel one and a eight wheel one.
Rich
OK THANKS
Hey, 8500,
I just happen to have that Durango Press Caboose, & some trucks lying around to make this picture!!
I hope it will give you a definitive answer on your question.
Shown here are;
A Durango Press HOn3 Caboose (moched up with rubber cement for this shot, [roof, coupla, c.roof])
Blackstone HOn3 Archbar trucks w/outside brakes
KitBits HO caboose trucks (which I intend to use on an AMB GN/BN short caboose)
Athearn HO 100T Rollerbearing .88 truck
In this shot you can see the massiveness of the standard HO trucks, even the smaller KitBits caboose ones. If I were you & want a real nice caboose in HO, please look at the AMB (American Model Builders/LaserKit) GN/BN lazer cut caboose. it offers a lot of possibilities, but you do have to supply trucks & couplers.
I really Hope this helps!
That Durango Press caboose looks like a West Side Lumber prototype - small even by 36 inch gauge standards. As Chad’s photo shows, if you put standard gauge trucks in the usual places under it it would look like a five year old girl in Mom’s high heel pumps.
OTOH, loggers frequently used whatever came to hand and was already paid for. Taking a leaf from the Kiso Forest Railway, instead of mounting the caboose on standard trucks, mount it in the bunks of a log car, or on two ex-disconnect trucks with the pivots under the caboose platforms and a wide, flat pivoting platform at each end. That’s a legitimate reason for truck-mounted couplers!
(The Kiso built EVERYTHING on disconnect trucks, from flat cars to passenger cars. Their ‘standard’ caboose was built on ONE disconnect truck, and was about as big as Superman’s phone booth.)
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Truck-swapping has happened on the prototype. When the railroad I model, the Cincinnati, Lebanon & Northern, standard-gauged, they lifted all their passenger cars off their narrow-gauge trucks and put them down on standard-gauge trucks. It looked a little funny, but the trucks didn’t overhang the cars; narrow-gauge cars were skinny, but not that skinny! They used those cars for years, upgrading only when the cars broke down or wore out.
I’ve also heard tell of narrow-gauge railroads that interchanged with standard-gauge roads by swapping trucks on loaded cars at the interchange point, though I can’t recall where I heard that happening. Somewhere out West, perhaps.
The East Broad Top at Mt. Union, PA, would lift standard gauge cars and put them on narrow (36") trucks using an overhead crane. The trouble was that they were very unstable, being much wider cars riding on such a smaller gauge. Therefore, they were always spotted in front of the caboose so the crew could keep a close eye on them. Also, the track speed for these moves was restricted.
Paul A. Cutler III
Short is that there is absolutely no size difference between “HO” and “HOn3” scales. They are the same scale.
The only caveat is that as mentioned, equipment designed for narrow-gauge operation tends to be built smaller than standard-gauge equipment.
There are cases where equipment is re-trucked for operation on narrow gauge traffic. Before the rails were abandoned on the island of Newfoundland (Canada), the island’s network was all narrow gauge. Standard gauge cars were interchanged from the mainline via car ferry and re-trucked at the ferry dock for island operation. The much smaller narrow gauge trucks under the standard body made for a pretty wide overhang over either side.