O gauge has a very interesting history. I could go into that alone, but I'll keep it simple - it started in the late 19th century with the German toy manufacturer Märklin. In fact, they originated several toy train gauges, but here, we're talking O gauge, which is normally thought of as 1.25" between the rails, or 32mm (actually, 31.75mm).
You might want to get some coffee, because things are about to get a touch complicated.
If proper O gauge represents what is normally thought of as standard gauge (4' 81/2" or 1.435 meters... and the topic for another conversation), then it should be to a scale of 1/45.2, or simply 1/45.
It isn't.
This is where it really starts to go, well, off the rails.
Here in the United States and Canada, it is normally 1/48, or for those of us still using the old Imperial measuring system, 1/4" to 1'.
1/4" is .25".
This means that O gauge in North America is 5', 60", or 1.524 meters.
While that gauge is in fact standard in some places, it is not in North America.
This means that people who use that scale for O gauge are in fact not correct to scale.
In the past some have sought to overcome this by creating interesting ways around it. One was using 17/64" to the foot, which works out to 1/45.17... almost on the nose. That ended when a couple of manufacturers decided to just go with the easier 1/4" - 1/48th scale.
But wait, it gets better.
The British, and to a degree the French, or so I am told, use 7mm to the foot (you'll find this peculiar mixing of metric and Imperial in model railroading and in missing Mars probes).This results in 1/43.5, which is also quite common for for diecast cars.
However (you knew this was coming), Märklin specified that their O gauge should be 1/45, the correct scale for the gauge.
Some true scale hobbyist are finding other ways to get around this, with Proto48 here in North American and SuperSeven in the UK. Here in North American, this means Proto48 enthusiasts use 1.1875" - 30mm gauge. SuperSeven enthusiasts? They use 33mm or 1.299" gauge. Not much trans-Atlantic cooperation these days where true scale is concerned.
The majority of users seem content with 1/48.
Not all users, though.
We'll touch on that next.
Milton Cronkhite, who built the original layout in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, came up with he called Q gauge. The trains were scaled 1/4" to the foot like O scale, but the track was gauged to 1 3/16" which corresponds to the correct gauge for O scale. He built multiple layouts to this gauge before the museum layout, of course, he had to land lay the tracks and scratch-build the trucks for his rolling stock. When the layout was modernized in the 1950s, it was re-laid with conventional O gauge track.
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