I get a lot of letters, since that’s part of what editors do, and now and then one of them hauls me up short. A recent one was from a fellow who was all riled up about my discussion of Fn3, which is the three-foot narrow gauge subset of F scale, that being 1:20.3. He went on to lament that I had slighted “true F scale” by not discussing it “with no n3 appendage to muddy the waters.”
Okay, we’re going to hold it right there and cut it back to fundamentals. Railroads built America and, while we’re at it, Canada and Mexico, along with numerous other nations on the planet. The concept remains simple and enduring. Two ribbons of steel are held apart by ties of wood at an exact distance so that flanged wheels under various conveyances can be pulled with fair ease between various destinations. Thomas Jefferson was chided that his Louisiana Purchase would need a thousand years to settle. We did it in a hundred, but in 1804, no one knew we’d cheat and use railroads.
Standard gauge? That concept is a Johnny-come-lately. We like to think of it as 4-feet 8-1/2-inches, but more track in the world is laid in five foot than our standard 56.5 inches. Prior to the Civil War, much of the South was laid in five foot gauge, and the Erie Railroad was gauged at six feet until June 22, 1880.
Narrow gauge was a tool used to solve problems. The usual problems were mountains and money. A narrow gauge railway typically has a narrower right of way, so it requires less excavation, shorter ties, and that saves a huge amount of money on construction. Because the cars are shorter, narrower, lighter, not as tall or tippy, and the trains aren’t as heavy, this lets the track climb stiffer grades and round tighter curves, again saving construction costs.
Small locomotives pulled small trains to haul commodities out of difficult-to reach locations down to more metropolitan locations. Colorado had dozens of small narrow gauge lines that carried mining commodities down to processing centers. In other places, coal or oil became the center of the commodity business. It was rare for narrow gauge lines to interchange cars with connecting roads; they usually trans-loaded. More common was for a narrow gauge line to be a commodity feeder. Logging roads would carry logs into a mill on narrow gauge tracks, but the resulting lumber would be shipped out the other side of the mill on standard gauge cars.
This same thing happened in places where certain agricultural products were raised. It wasn’t unusual for sugar beets to be hauled to a processing plant in narrow gauge gondolas where the finished products were taken to market in standard gauge boxcars. The same happened with numerous other crops, and the bottom line was that a small narrow gauge line for a dedicated service was relatively inexpensive to establish.
Construction projects often created narrow gauge railways to assist them in their works. Dandy little teakettle locomotives worked hard all day, hauling fill dirt or packing out excavated mine products. Mines even built their own tracks down into the ground.
These little narrow gauge railroads are no less fascinating than the standard gauge railroads around us, and many of them survive today. Small wonder that every scale of model railroading features an “nN” of some sort after its scale letter. Some of the most robust fans in any scale are its narrow gauge adherents!
We usually designate narrow gauge in model railroading by foot designation, but not always. Three-foot narrow gauge would be “n3,” so HOn3 would be HO scale, 3-foot narrow gauge. Two and- a-half foot would be HOn21/2 . So, it is my opinion that Fn3 does not muddy the waters one single bit. But it might help to understand a bit more about how it got to where it is.
Originally, 1:32 was designated as #1 scale and the standard-gauge track that went with it was called #1 gauge track, its rails being 56.5/32 = 1.765625 inches apart, rounded to about 1.77 inches. Now, if you were to take 36 inches (that being 3-foot narrow gauge) and divide it by 1.77, you get 20.3, rounded. In truth, there was already an existing collectors’ scale at 1:18 that would have been much more convenient, supplying vehicles and such. That would have made the track about 32-inch gauge, quite rare. So 1:20.3 was born.
F scale does exist and it’s a wonderful scale. The rails are 2.78 inches apart, and a 135 foot long Big Boy would scale out to six feet and almost eight inches long. The figures, buildings, and other scale stuff for 1:20.3 would be good for F or Fn3, the same as happens in any scale standard and narrow gauge relationship.
This letter-writer further delineated narrow gauge from standard by referring to the latter as “true F scale,” which is clearly inappropriate. If the scale is other than 1:20.3 and is sold as F scale, then it is not true. If an item is precisely 1:20.3, then it is true F scale. If the wheels are set up to run on three-foot narrow gauge, then it is Fn3, and that’s that.
This gentleman is facing the opposite issue of our friends in HO scale. There the standard gauge contingent dominates the scale, though there is a very robust narrow gauge subset in operation. Fn3 scale is very popular in garden railroading in part because there is a ready supply of relatively inexpensive track and rolling stock available, especially if operators don’t mind mixing scales (and many really don’t).
In HO, perhaps ninety percent of the merchandise is going to standard gauge layouts, but the ten percent going to narrow gauge takes advantage of the many items that aren’t specific to rail gauge such as buildings, figures, and the like. F scale, on the other hand, finds probably more than ninety percent of its made-to-scale products headed into three-foot narrow gauge applications because that’s where the market lies. I think F Standard should just enjoy the coattails! — John Sipple
Okay, we’re going to hold it right there and cut it back to fundamentals. Railroads built America and, while we’re at it, Canada and Mexico, along with numerous other nations on the planet. The concept remains simple and enduring. Two ribbons of steel are held apart by ties of wood at an exact distance so that flanged wheels under various conveyances can be pulled with fair ease between various destinations. Thomas Jefferson was chided that his Louisiana Purchase would need a thousand years to settle. We did it in a hundred, but in 1804, no one knew we’d cheat and use railroads.
Standard gauge? That concept is a Johnny-come-lately. We like to think of it as 4-feet 8-1/2-inches, but more track in the world is laid in five foot than our standard 56.5 inches. Prior to the Civil War, much of the South was laid in five foot gauge, and the Erie Railroad was gauged at six feet until June 22, 1880.
Narrow gauge was a tool used to solve problems. The usual problems were mountains and money. A narrow gauge railway typically has a narrower right of way, so it requires less excavation, shorter ties, and that saves a huge amount of money on construction. Because the cars are shorter, narrower, lighter, not as tall or tippy, and the trains aren’t as heavy, this lets the track climb stiffer grades and round tighter curves, again saving construction costs.
Small locomotives pulled small trains to haul commodities out of difficult-to reach locations down to more metropolitan locations. Colorado had dozens of small narrow gauge lines that carried mining commodities down to processing centers. In other places, coal or oil became the center of the commodity business. It was rare for narrow gauge lines to interchange cars with connecting roads; they usually trans-loaded. More common was for a narrow gauge line to be a commodity feeder. Logging roads would carry logs into a mill on narrow gauge tracks, but the resulting lumber would be shipped out the other side of the mill on standard gauge cars.
This same thing happened in places where certain agricultural products were raised. It wasn’t unusual for sugar beets to be hauled to a processing plant in narrow gauge gondolas where the finished products were taken to market in standard gauge boxcars. The same happened with numerous other crops, and the bottom line was that a small narrow gauge line for a dedicated service was relatively inexpensive to establish.
Construction projects often created narrow gauge railways to assist them in their works. Dandy little teakettle locomotives worked hard all day, hauling fill dirt or packing out excavated mine products. Mines even built their own tracks down into the ground.
These little narrow gauge railroads are no less fascinating than the standard gauge railroads around us, and many of them survive today. Small wonder that every scale of model railroading features an “nN” of some sort after its scale letter. Some of the most robust fans in any scale are its narrow gauge adherents!
We usually designate narrow gauge in model railroading by foot designation, but not always. Three-foot narrow gauge would be “n3,” so HOn3 would be HO scale, 3-foot narrow gauge. Two and- a-half foot would be HOn21/2 . So, it is my opinion that Fn3 does not muddy the waters one single bit. But it might help to understand a bit more about how it got to where it is.
Originally, 1:32 was designated as #1 scale and the standard-gauge track that went with it was called #1 gauge track, its rails being 56.5/32 = 1.765625 inches apart, rounded to about 1.77 inches. Now, if you were to take 36 inches (that being 3-foot narrow gauge) and divide it by 1.77, you get 20.3, rounded. In truth, there was already an existing collectors’ scale at 1:18 that would have been much more convenient, supplying vehicles and such. That would have made the track about 32-inch gauge, quite rare. So 1:20.3 was born.
F scale does exist and it’s a wonderful scale. The rails are 2.78 inches apart, and a 135 foot long Big Boy would scale out to six feet and almost eight inches long. The figures, buildings, and other scale stuff for 1:20.3 would be good for F or Fn3, the same as happens in any scale standard and narrow gauge relationship.
This letter-writer further delineated narrow gauge from standard by referring to the latter as “true F scale,” which is clearly inappropriate. If the scale is other than 1:20.3 and is sold as F scale, then it is not true. If an item is precisely 1:20.3, then it is true F scale. If the wheels are set up to run on three-foot narrow gauge, then it is Fn3, and that’s that.
This gentleman is facing the opposite issue of our friends in HO scale. There the standard gauge contingent dominates the scale, though there is a very robust narrow gauge subset in operation. Fn3 scale is very popular in garden railroading in part because there is a ready supply of relatively inexpensive track and rolling stock available, especially if operators don’t mind mixing scales (and many really don’t).
In HO, perhaps ninety percent of the merchandise is going to standard gauge layouts, but the ten percent going to narrow gauge takes advantage of the many items that aren’t specific to rail gauge such as buildings, figures, and the like. F scale, on the other hand, finds probably more than ninety percent of its made-to-scale products headed into three-foot narrow gauge applications because that’s where the market lies. I think F Standard should just enjoy the coattails! — John Sipple