Back in the late 1980's through the better part of the 1990's I started developing an interest in garden railways.
If you know anything about model trains in any scale then you know that none of it is what you would call inexpensive, especially garden railroads.
I found a way - cheap battery powered sets, namely New Bright, Echo, and occasionally odd brands. They were all to the same size, Number 1 or G gauge, 45mm twixt the rails. Nobody thought about compatibility, however - none of the track worked across brands, though the cars worked on all (couplers were another issue).
The whole cheap G gauge explosion was an anomaly that seems to persist to this day, though classic New Bright has vanished (they are concentrating on RC these days). Amazingly, for their price they have proven to be surprisingly hearty and long lived, though this is probably because of the relative deluge of them. The same cannot be said for many of their forebears.
These earlier ones were in a variety of gauges, with the largest concentration being in O gauge, followed by all sorts of odd, random sizes. Surprisingly, HO/OO (16.5mm), or something approximating it, was probably a close second to O.
This isn't to say that the track was compatible. Oftentimes it was just a roadbed through troughs. The rolling stock, though, fit on regular 16.5mm track.
I discovered this in 1994 as I played around with a cheap battery powered locomotive my then wife found at the thrift store. My interest was not in keeping it HO gauge, though, but in using the mechanism for a railcar.
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| (Image from eBay) |
Years later, which is to say now, I discover that the shell had come from a long gone Triang HO/OO 0-4-0T. All the new Hong Kong manufacturer did was to replace the mechanism with a cheaper, six wheeled one.
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| (From the Tria Ang In Canada Site) |
This is just one of two locomotives that shared similar fates. The Lima 0-4-0T American style saddle tank locomotive experienced the same, becoming a battery operated version of its former self, complete with what appear to be copies of Lima rolling stock -
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| (From the Lima Tribute Site) |
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| (From eBay) |
I think like a Zombie, that Triang may be back, I think the mechanism is the same as the "Toy Train In a Tin Express" trains you see everywhere, and of which I have been given two. I shall explore in a future video.
ReplyDeleteI have several of the New Bright and Echo trains. You can see them running on my Garden Railway in my videos on occasion, I also have one we run for "National Train Day" at the Cleburne Railroad Museum, being battery powered, we don't have to work about finding a place to plug them in. You go through a lot of C batteries running these, and the thick flanges on I think the Echo ones do not like the crossover on my garden railway, but they are still a lot of fun to run.