scale and gauge

There is a plethora of different model building scales out there, and if you like scratchbuilding, you're not limited to those that have kits available. Here's a quick roundup of the most popular scales in model railroading and how they compare to other model building hobbies.

So we're at the NMRA Midwest Region convention and we get to talking about modeling scales. There was a preponderance of N scalers in our bunch, so we came up with these:

• Z = Zany
• N = Normal, Nice or Neat
• TT = Totally Terrible
• HO = Horribly Oversized
• S = Strange
• O = Outrageous
• G = Gross

You've decided what you want to model and you know the size of the layout location. There's one more decision yet to make, and it's one that will affect your model building purchases for quite some time. You need to decide on what scale to use in your model building.

Scale vs. Gauge

First of all, there is one important distinction to learn, and that's the difference between scale and gauge. In short, these two terms can be defined as follows:

Scale

The ratio of miniaturization of an object.

Gauge

The distance between the rails on a section of track.