Scaling Down

[Train Waiting]

I don't know if this will be of much interest, but there was an article about 'Hot Wheels' cars in the 'Daily Telegraph' on 4 August 2018.  This range of 1:64 models has now been available for 50 years.  For me, the fascinating part of the article (I'm not really interested in how many models a collector has or how much the rarest one is worth) was a quote from Ted Wu, who is in charge of the Hot Wheels design team,  "When we create the Hot Wheels version of a real vehicle, people often think that we can just shrink the design but the funny thing is that vehicles don't look quite right if you simply shrink them 64 times."

Back in my P4 days, trying to model a station to scale, I had this niggling doubt that it somehow ... looked wrong.  I had done a lot of research, including site surveys, so I knew that the dimensions were right.  But they were so right that they looked wrong.

I've thought about this on and off over the years and was glad to read Mr Wu's observation.

The reason for this impression is probably multifactorial (viewing angle, light, background, photographs compared to the human eye and suchlike) and subtle, but I'm interested in Mr Wu's point.  Interestingly, the sub editor appears to be as well, because she made this one of these little highlighted quotes that newspapers use nowadays.

I wonder if anyone else on the Forum has thought this or should I give up trains and collect model cars instead?

Best wishes.

John