A new standard for N gauge?

[DJM Dave]

Maybe what is needed is simply a start on finer N gauge points.

I wonder if a true crowd funded medium l/h or r/h (or another in produced radius) would be the answer here.

After all, lots of us have new stock and we all, I would hope, hate wheel drop on the frogs of our points, making even the smoothest running train 'dip'.
This could be engineered out right at the start.

Maybe sold with a warning that it won't necessarily like older stock as well for those that have them?

I think conquering the point frog drop problem is the first way forward.

Sell a new radius and then if successful follow it up with a more common used version, only newer?

Just an idea
Dave

[Dr Al]

Mainly because every new Farish loco comes with a very pretty set of NEM wheels free of charge.

Well.....hardly free....you pay for them as part of the loco...... 

The 2mm FS wheelsets are split axle with very small journals and large muffs, and don't readily lend themselves to rewheeling RTR locos.  2mm is 1:152, only 3% smaller than 1:148 but when you are trying to squeeze motors into strange old Scottish locos you need all the room you can find.

To me the obvious, and more elegent solution to this already exists - the coreless motor by Farish - this is way smaller than anything else, is circular in cross section, and will easily fit in any boiler I can think of (it's that small I think it'd even fit in a Crosti 9F preheater boiler just about.....  ). It's also a beautiful runner, way superior to the older cans. This seems to be the way things are going for the top two manufacturers (and DJM), so hopefully these will become more widespread and available as useful spares in due course.

Cheers,
Alan

[belstone]

Mainly because every new Farish loco comes with a very pretty set of NEM wheels free of charge.

Well.....hardly free....you pay for them as part of the loco...... 

The 2mm FS wheelsets are split axle with very small journals and large muffs, and don't readily lend themselves to rewheeling RTR locos.  2mm is 1:152, only 3% smaller than 1:148 but when you are trying to squeeze motors into strange old Scottish locos you need all the room you can find.

To me the obvious, and more elegent solution to this already exists - the coreless motor by Farish - this is way smaller than anything else, is circular in cross section, and will easily fit in any boiler I can think of (it's that small I think it'd even fit in a Crosti 9F preheater boiler just about.....  ). It's also a beautiful runner, way superior to the older cans. This seems to be the way things are going for the top two manufacturers (and DJM), so hopefully these will become more widespread and available as useful spares in due course.

Cheers,
Alan

I've been looking at these coreless motors on Alibaba, but haven't yet found one to exactly the spec I am looking for in terms of voltage, body size and shaft length.  I'm actually quite impressed with the performance of the flat can in the J27 and 2P.  It's a little sweetie really, and putting it in a different chassis shows up just how lousy that J39 tender drive is.

Richard

[Dr Al]

I've been looking at these coreless motors on Alibaba, but haven't yet found one to exactly the spec I am looking for

Have you asked Bachmann if you can buy a spare from them direct?

I'm actually quite impressed with the performance of the flat can in the J27 and 2P.  It's a little sweetie really, and putting it in a different chassis shows up just how lousy that J39 tender drive is.

It's not perfect, but I don't know that the J39 is that bad. The motor is nothing special - it feels of reasonably good quality materials, but it's a 3 pole high revving short lifespan unit. The coreless is a step up from that.

Cheers,
Alan

[Roy L S]

I think the hot weather has fried my brain.  For N gauge standards we already have:

1:148 / 9mm gauge - British N
1:150 / 9mm gauge - Japanese N
1:160 / 9mm gauge - Continental / American N
1:152 / 9.42mm gauge - British 2mm Finescale
1:160 / 9mm gauge FS160 - US / European equivalent of 2mm Finescale

So of course what we need is another standard... Bear with me on this one.  I think that the massive leap forward in quality of ready to run British "N" has changed everything.  It looks beautiful, mostly runs very well, and the only thing that really lets it down now for me is the narrow-gauge appearance.  9mm scales up to around 4'1" at 1:148 which is OK if you are modelling the Padarn Railway.  2mm FS has the correct gauge, but there is about a 3% difference in size between 1:152 and 1:148, which is just enough to be noticeable.  More problematic, the very fine wheel standards in 2mm FS mean that unless you are happy with diesels (or a Jinty), you are probably going to have to tackle etched chassis construction right at the start if you want to run any trains. That is not just a minor inconvenience.

So what I am thinking of doing, just for the fun of it, is combining British N dimensions (1:148) and modern N gauge wheel standards (i.e NEM, RP25 or something in between) with 9.42 mm gauge track.  At 1:148 this scales up to around 4'7", still slightly narrow but a lot better than 9mm, and with a bit more clearance for valve gear etc than the correct 1:148 gauge of 9.7mm, bearing in mind that RP25 wheels are a fair way over scale width.  This implies a back-to-back setting around 7.85 - 7.9mm, and I think most modern RTR will take this without major reconstruction, although driving axles might have to be shimmed to limit sideplay. Or, on a split-frame Farish chassis, maybe shim the spacers between the chassis halves and make a new keeper plate. I'd have to dismantle one and have a look. I have a rather battered and mauled J39 which would make an excellent guinea pig.

Obviously pointwork will have to be hand-built, although 2mm Assoc Easitrac will take care of the plain bits in between.  Having said which I see the 2mm Assoc has just launched an Easitrac turnout range which looks similar in construction to the FineTrax products (pegged plastic chairs in pre-drilled milled bases), and it may be possible to use 2mm Assoc bases with FineTrax frog crossings and check rail chairs.

I think I might actually try this - build a B6 turnout to 9.42 gauge but using the FineTrax standards for check rail and crossing clearances, nail it to a bit of wood with some Easitrac, and see if I can get anything to run. On the other hand, the weather is due to get cooler, so perhaps my brain will stop overheating and let me go back to 1:148 / 9mm and be happy with it like everyone else

Richard

Hi Richard

Before going too far down the route of re defining track standards just one small erm, point (sorry!).

00 Gauge (16.5mm) at 4mm/ft scales out at 4ft 1 inch.

British N Gauge (9mm) at 2 1/16mm/ft (or 2.0625 in metric) scales out much better at: -

9 / 2.0625 = 4.36ft or in imperial a tad over 4ft and 4 inches. In other words it scales out at a shade over 4 inches too narrow or in N about 0.4 of a mm.

Personally I think it's close enough!!

Kind Regards

Roy

[edwin_m]

I can't get excited about a 0.42mm error in the track gauge.  Proportionately it's less than half the error in 00 gauge, everything's smaller and harder to see in N, and the rails are probably a bit over-width which takes up some of the difference anyway. 

I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the "narrow gauge" look of British N is to do with people using the manufacturer's standard track spacing, which gives a rather wider "six foot" than most prototype double tracks.  I've seen pictures of sections of Peco points being removed (not affecting the moving parts) to make a crossover between closer tracks, and I now wish I'd done this before I laid my track! 

[belstone]

Hi Richard

Before going too far down the route of re defining track standards just one small erm, point (sorry!).

00 Gauge (16.5mm) at 4mm/ft scales out at 4ft 1 inch.

British N Gauge (9mm) at 2 1/16mm/ft (or 2.0625 in metric) scales out much better at: -

9 / 2.0625 = 4.36ft or in imperial a tad over 4ft and 4 inches. In other words it scales out at a shade over 4 inches too narrow or in N about 0.4 of a mm.

Personally I think it's close enough!!

Kind Regards

Roy

Mostly right, except that the difference between 9mm and true 1:148 gauge is actually 0.7mm, so it's about 9% undersize. That's actually quite a bit. 1:148 / 9.42 only goes just over half way to bridging that gap, so you're probably right in that it's not enough of an improvement to be worth the hassle for most people. 9.7mm gauge would be possible with self-built track but not with NEM wheels, would have to be 2mm FS to get the clearances, and I'm not that mad (yet). I might still give 1:148 / 9.42 a go, just for fun. It strikes a balance between true scale appearance and commercial availability, and it advances the realism of British "N" if only a tiny bit. (0.42mm to be exact.)

Richard

[Dr Al]

and it advances the realism of British "N" if only a tiny bit. (0.42mm to be exact.)

To be offset again the potential realism lost if mucking about with the wheels results in wonky running of the locos - and it's well known that this has happened to folk adjusting BTBs on various models (some are specifically vulnerable to monkeying around with the wheels), only for them to loose quartering irrepairably soon after.

And given the good asthetics of  Easitrack, Finetrax, nobody'll notice whether they're done to 9 or ~9.4 mil (as I doubt you'll be able to measure to 9.42 mm with micron level accuracy anyway - +/-10 microns?!! ~1/10 the diameter of a human hair? Really? This is getting silly................. )

Cheers,
Alan

[PLD]

it advances the realism of British "N" if only a tiny bit.

A laudable aim, but "Realism" is about far more than how wide apart your rails are... I fear you risk falling into the trap that so many P4 modellers do by becoming fixated on the wheels/track. That alone does not make a good or "realistic" layout...

For many layouts the quickest and easiest way to improve "realism" is in how they are operated, and the majority of track plans are improved not by .4mm in the track gauge but by a .4 metres increase in curve radii...

[edwin_m]

...and the ability to have tight curves is one of the benefits of N, provided they are off-scene or disguised.  If any finescale standard increased the minimum radius then this would make it more difficult to hide curve that are often still much tighter than scale (a 60mph curve scaled to N would be about 6m radius). 

[belstone]

Some good points: my layout plan combines a nice sweeping 2' radius curve through the scenic area with tight 9" in the bits you can't see.  I think 9.42 on NEM wheels at 7.85mm back to back would cope with 9", not so sure about 2mm FS.  It's asking a lot of scale depth flanges.  I'm not really fixated on gauge, otherwise I'd go for 9.7mm and do absolutely everything myself starting with track gauges.  I guess my thinking is that if I'm going to have to build my own pointwork anyway, and most of the locos I need want will be scratchbuilt (J27, J21, J35, J36, D34, D30, G5), then pushing the gauge out half a mil or so doesn't add massively to the workload. And just try finding track gauges for 9mm code 40.

DJM Dave - I dunno.  Ready to lay finescale track sounds good in theory, problem is that it ends up being yet another skill that people no longer need to acquire.  I just revived my long-abandoned blog with an extended rant on this subject, which as an RTR manufacturer you are free to disagree with entirely

http://belstone9mm.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/were-doomed.html

[railsquid]

DJM Dave - I dunno.  Ready to lay finescale track sounds good in theory, problem is that it ends up being yet another skill that people no longer need to acquire.  I just revived my long-abandoned blog with an extended rant on this subject, which as an RTR manufacturer you are free to disagree with entirely

http://belstone9mm.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/were-doomed.html

Personally I'm disgusted that self-styled "scratchbuilders" aren't winding their own motors, rolling their own rails, processing the crude oil required for plastic parts or mining the copper for their layout wiring. Yet more skills that are falling victim to mass production... We're doomed, I say, doomed.

Or look at it the other way... all this RTR (or in the case of tracks, scenery etc. Ready-To-Plonk) stuff could be drawing people into the hobby who might otherwise give up in frustration at the effort involved. Personally, speaking as someone who reentered the hobby not long before a very time-consuming baby came along, I remember setting up a loop of Kato track and being amazed by the ease I could run trains with (especially compared to childhood OO gauge), and from that has developed an interest which is - despite limited time - diversifying towards kitbashing stuff, modifying/repairing RTR stock, putting "make my own track" on the long-term todo list should I ever reacquire the mythical "free time at weekends" etcetera. Had the requirement to run trains been "build all my own stuff from lumps of coal and old tin cans like Bill Pringles did in 19thirtyeighteen", I wouldn't be a member of this forum (heck, the forum probably wouldn't exist, there'd probably just be a group of real modellers sending mimeographed bulletins to each other).

[belstone]

Personally I'm disgusted that self-styled "scratchbuilders" aren't winding their own motors, rolling their own rails, processing the crude oil required for plastic parts or mining the copper for their layout wiring. Yet more skills that are falling victim to mass production... We're doomed, I say, doomed.

Or look at it the other way... all this RTR (or in the case of tracks, scenery etc. Ready-To-Plonk) stuff could be drawing people into the hobby who might otherwise give up in frustration at the effort involved. Personally, speaking as someone who reentered the hobby not long before a very time-consuming baby came along, I remember setting up a loop of Kato track and being amazed by the ease I could run trains with (especially compared to childhood OO gauge), and from that has developed an interest which is - despite limited time - diversifying towards kitbashing stuff, modifying/repairing RTR stock, putting "make my own track" on the long-term todo list should I ever reacquire the mythical "free time at weekends" etcetera. Had the requirement to run trains been "build all my own stuff from lumps of coal and old tin cans like Bill Pringles did in 19thirtyeighteen", I wouldn't be a member of this forum (heck, the forum probably wouldn't exist, there'd probably just be a group of real modellers sending mimeographed bulletins to each other).

I'm not saying there is any requirement to build everything or indeed anything yourself.  If your main aim in building a layout is to see trains run, great. The problem I see there is that on the average layout it doesn't take too long to exhaust all the operational possibilities, and what then? Well, you could always buy more trains...  I volunteered a couple of times as an operator on a club exhibition layout.  Great, spend the whole day running trains, what could be nicer?  After an hour I was bored.  Two hours in and I was so bored that I even started talking to members of the public.  After three hours I was hoping that a member of the public would turn up with a dog on a lead, so I could talk about dogs rather than trains.  And there were still three hours to go.

(Vision of hell: operating a diesel depot layout with DCC sound and LED lighting at a two-day show. Bring Migraleve. And whisky.)

You're right, I'm sure the desperately pretty little models in the glass display cases draw new people into the hobby, and it is vitally important that they aren't put off by stuff that doesn't work, is too fiddly or needs skills they have yet to acquire. But how do we make sure those people stay in the hobby for life? That's what I mean when I talk about encouraging people to develop new skills. The question is, how do you do that when, as you say, most people have very limited free time and will happily take any short-cut they are offered? I don't know the answer to that.

Richard

[Ricardus Harfelde]

Some good points: my layout plan combines a nice sweeping 2' radius curve through the scenic area with tight 9" in the bits you can't see.  I think 9.42 on NEM wheels at 7.85mm back to back would cope with 9", not so sure about 2mm FS.  It's asking a lot of scale depth flanges.  I'm not really fixated on gauge, otherwise I'd go for 9.7mm and do absolutely everything myself starting with track gauges.  I guess my thinking is that if I'm going to have to build my own pointwork anyway, and most of the locos I need want will be scratchbuilt (J27, J21, J35, J36, D34, D30, G5), then pushing the gauge out half a mil or so doesn't add massively to the workload. And just try finding track gauges for 9mm code 40.

My understanding is that the minimum radius for 2mm FS is 24 in if you want to run things like 0-6-0s, which is quite a drawback as my Peco 55/80 layout which I'm thinking of converting to 2mm FS standards also has 9in curves in the hidden sections. i've currently been playing around building copper clad sleeper points to 9.42 mm gauge, but with the flangeways & checkrails set to support N gauge stock, with the idea that these could converted to support 2mm FS standard stock  by adjusting the position of these to narrow the clearances. The main reason I'd want to convert is because it seems a lot easier to get  reasonable looking steam loco wheels to allow me to build my own locos

Richard

[belstone]

My understanding is that the minimum radius for 2mm FS is 24 in if you want to run things like 0-6-0s, which is quite a drawback as my Peco 55/80 layout which I'm thinking of converting to 2mm FS standards also has 9in curves in the hidden sections. i've currently been playing around building copper clad sleeper points to 9.42 mm gauge, but with the flangeways & checkrails set to support N gauge stock, with the idea that these could converted to support 2mm FS standard stock  by adjusting the position of these to narrow the clearances. The main reason I'd want to convert is because it seems a lot easier to get  reasonable looking steam loco wheels to allow me to build my own locos

Richard

After the hassle I've had this evening with the 2P's wheels I'm starting to wonder if 2mm FS might actually be easier.  That locking compound I used to secure the wheels is rubbish, so the quartering slipped again.  Farish push-fit crankpins, as I have now found, don't like being removed and refitted multiple times.  They go wonky.  Then I dropped a crankpin on the floor and can't find it.  I can't decide whether to do an all-nighter and get the thing to work, or go to bed in a bad mood. And everything was going so well until I fitted the coupling rods...

Richard
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