O Model Railroad
We love O toy railroads and locomotives, there’s just no denying it? You can hold up the locomotives and really take a look at them. You require two mits to hold it even as an adult. And you can really see the detail. This is not one of those tiny little locomotives you need to go get your microscope for. I don’t know about you but I could easily stare at this train for hours. Why do O locomotives just seem to come at us from some place deep in ourselves? Here’s why:
Nostalgia:
Baby boomers grew up with these trains and had their impressions placed into their memories even before they constructed a sense of their own identities. If you passed by a department store during the holiday season as a kid you probably saw one of these trains in an elaborate display. Many of us wrote these locomotives on our Christmas lists in the hope that we might wake up to their whistle on Christmas morning. And they’re also likely to be the model trains that you didn’t get because they were too pricy. Because of this they are in addition the locomotives that remained always in the land of the wished for. Now that you have become a hobbyist again, they are the locomotives that are most likely to scratch that long festering itch.
O model railroads are more often than not Lionel train railroads:
It was Lionel (now Lionel LLC) that popularized these trains. Lionel is still perhaps the most well known brand in the toy train business. They have weathered more ups and downs than any other locomotive manufacturer and had more face lifts than Elizabeth Taylor’s had husbands. Lionel’s aggressive marketing in the pre-WWII era is the reason why you associate model trains with Christmas. It was these strategies that made them the kings of the toy training world in the early previous century. It was only during the baby boom after the GI’s came back that competitors like Bachmann started overtaking Lionel by marketing littler locomotives at more reasonable prices. By the sixties when model training was at an all time low in terms of American interest, Lionel’s lower cost, smaller sized competitors pushed it out of business. But Lionel has been resurrected as Lionel LLC and, though still beset by revenue woes, remains one of the central model train makers around. The Lionel brand still holds a certain majic that other long standing train makers like Bachmann don’t.
O gauge is just a wonderful size to work with:
Although O gauge requires a lot more room than HO or N, its size also offers a large host of benefits. O gauge model railroads are not as large as the German g gauge that appeals to out-doorsy enthusiasts. O scale is one 48th the size of actual locomotives. It is a train that is easy to paint, decal and weather. You don’t require incredibly fine motor skills so even the least coordinated of young people or most palsied of old folks can work with these locomotives. Even if you can’t paint the side of a barn you will find O scale a manageable toy to work with. Because these are such large trains people will actually see your handy work. You can really individualize your model training experience with O scale since everything is on a gauge that you could do them from scratch. O gauges reputation is well deserved.
Model train fans idealize O scale because of its full tradition:
Fan’s of model trains just love O because of its connection with Lionel locomotives. Vintage Lionel trains of days gone past often fetch good prices on e-bay and many model locomotive enthusiasts like to collect Lionel locomotives from different time periods so that they can have a sort of vibrant history of the evolution of model locomotives.
Even if this were a just developed scale with no fans, it would soon find hobbyists exclusively because it just seems like the perfect dimensions for a model train. It does take up more room than other tinier types of trains, but this drawback seems well worth it for most of us. Lionel, because of its wonderful brand identification, is unlikely to succumb to its debt problems. Even if it did, the long tradition of Lionel will keep O gauge fanatics stocked up for a great deal of time into the future. Just ask the rocker Neal Young who loved O scale locomotives so much that he was at one point part owner in Lionel and is still retained as an consultant to the company!
Here is more information on Model Train Scale. Here is a website with a free mini-course dedicated to Model Trains.