The Idaho Falls passenger depot as viewed from the south (Approximately 1920, the freight house track switch-lead can be seen in the foreground)

February 2001

(Volume 25, No. 2))

Jake Grasmick

Long time club member Jake Grasmick passed away on Tuesday, January 23, 2001.  Several members of the club were able to attend the funeral on Saturday, and one of the members was asked to speak.  The following is the text of that talk.

Memories of Jake

Jake was a long time member of our local model railroad club.  As a member of that club, I have some memories to share with you, both from myself and other members.

Jake was apparently interested in model trains for a long time.  He joined our local model railroad club before our current records, and he was one of our most faithful members.  The earliest record I could find of him was attending an open house in 1991.  Model railroaders have many interests, but Jake was an example of the most straightforward reason - he liked to watch the trains run. 

But Jake was more than just an watcher of trains.  He was a faithful member, showing up at the weekly sessions whether we were running trains, working, or having a business meeting.  He offered any help he could, even for the more mundane jobs that nobody liked to do, such as sweeping the floor, and was a great help in setting up for public displays, such as the Settler’s Fair.  He always took pride in his work - when at work, if he shined a floor, it would shine like none other you had ever seen.  Often he would clean up after we had made a mess.  Later, when we made a mess in the same place, he would sneak into the room and jokingly roar “Hey! Are you guys messing up my floor again?”.  About 5 years ago someone donated a layout to the club which had been stored in Salt Lake City.  Jake volunteered to go along to help load it and bring it back.

If he had a tool that was needed, he would always let us borrow it.  He shared a small foam train display with one of our members, and let him take it home, so that his kids became more interested in model trains.

At public shows Jake would gladly set up several examples of his trains in different sizes, operating them and willingly talking to the public.  He was one of our best ambassadors, and was responsible for several of our current members joining the club.  He also would talk about the club to his fellow workers.

He was generous - donating a layout to the club which we used for many years at public displays, as well as other items.  When the club had an open house or show and needed refreshments, he would bring donuts for all.  He offered the use of his garage for storage, and several club items were stored there for some time - probably to Mary’s disgust.

Jake helped us keep from taking ourselves too seriously.  He always seemed to have something to say to remind us that this is a hobby.  He was also one of our best critics.  Sometimes he would back one of the officers into the corner and tell exactly what he thought about something we were doing.  This often helped us rethink an idea or find a better approach to a problem.  He enjoyed banter with the other members.  He remembered and was an example of the idea that model railroading is fun.

One of our members operates his own business.  Jake worked at a building behind the store, and he would often stop in to say hello, talk about the club, and especially to talk trains.  Later, when he was in the area getting medical supplies, he would stop in, even though he had the inconvenience of hauling his oxygen tank along.  He never tired of talking trains.

In his last visit to the club room, it was obviously a struggle to navigate the stairs, but he appeared in the doorway as usual.  We put his prized Amtrak passenger train on the layout and ran it for his enjoyment.  When he left, he insisted he could make it up the stairs with no help.  30 minutes later two of our members found him still sitting in his car.  They asked him if he was OK, and he insisted he was - he just needed to rest a bit after the effort of climbing the stairs.  Mary said that was the last time he drove a car.

It will be hard to run a passenger train on our layout without thinking of Jake.  As a memorial, the club plans to retain one of his passenger trains, with the family’s blessing, and run it in his memory.  All of us will miss Jake’s smile and desire to watch the trains run.

Doug Herrmann, Leo Harker, Dave Shaw

Timetable

History of Scale and Gauge

In the early days of toy trains, track gauge was fairly arbitrary and scale was not even considered.  Trains were only for the rich, and electricity was not often used to propel them.  Some trains were even live steam, even though they were intended to be used indoors on the living room carpet.  Operating safety was not a consideration!

Gauges at that time tended to be much larger than the present gauges, and were numbered.  Common gauges were 4, 3, 2, 1, and, later, 0 (zero).  For many years, tinplate trains were built to ‘Standard’ gauge, which had a rail spacing of 2-1/8 inches.

Surprisingly, model railroading became more common during the Great Depression.  Perhaps people just had more time, since there wasn’t much work available.  England was ahead of the US, and they could see that, if more people were going to have model railroads, they would have to be smaller, since most houses and apartments didn’t have room for the larger sizes.

To accommodate this smaller size, they needed a smaller gauge.  About this time, the concept of scale also became more important.  The really cheap tinplate trains were made to 0 gauge, instead of Standard gauge.  English 0 had a scale of 7 mm to the foot and a gauge of 33 mm.  In the US, this combination became a scale of 1/4 inch to the foot and a track gauge of 1-1/4 inches.  Often, the more expensive trains would be larger than the cheaper trains, so that the scale varied - even though they ran on the same track.

One idea to make a smaller gauge was to cut the existing smallest gauge, 0, in half.  This produced a gauge of 16.5 mm and was called H0 (half zero).  This produced a problem, however.  At  the time there was no inexpensive electric motor small enough to fit inside a model of a British locomotive with a 3.5 mm to the foot scale.  An easy fix was to make the scale a little larger, so a scale of 4 mm to the foot was used.

During the mid 1930s several developments occurred.  The idea of building a model to a specific scale (and all parts of the model railroad to the same scale) began to take hold.  There were no standards, so equipment from one manufacturer would not run on track from another.  The National Model Railroad Association (NMRA) was formed, based on the ideas of Al Kalmbach, founder of a new magazine, Model Railroader, and others, to address these problems.

One of the first activities of the NMRA was to establish committees to set standards so that all equipment for a particular scale/gauge would be interchangeable.  They also set up dimensions and tolerances for each scale/gauge combination.

As the new H0 gauge was imported from England, modelers in the US tried to solve the problem that the 4 mm scale did not match the 16.5 mm track gauge.  As is usual in these situations, two groups developed.  One group decided to keep the 4 mm scale and widen the gauge to 19 mm, which they Americanized as 3/4 inch.  They called this combination OO gauge, to indicate it was smaller than 0 gauge, which had, by then, been renamed O gauge.  The other group decided to keep the 16.5 mm gauge and change the scale to 3.5 mm.  This was not a problem from the motor standpoint, as US prototype locomotives were bigger than British prototypes, so the existing motors could be used in US models in this smaller scale.  They called this scale/gauge combination HO, since it was still half of O gauge.  There was rivalry between the two groups, with each touting the superiority of their combination.

World War II stopped the production of model railroad equipment, since it was non-essential.  Lionel, Walthers, and other suppliers converted to building equipment for the armed forces.  This also allowed a couple of developments to occur in model railroading.

The development that affects us the most was that HO electrical standards were converted from 6 volts to 12 volts.  This helped reliability a great deal.  There were also a couple of new scale/gauge combinations, which started to be produced just after the war was over, but were conceived during the war.

A manufacturer and hobby shop in Cleveland developed a new combination which was bigger than HO but smaller than O.  They called this combination CD scale - which was an advertisement for their company.  The scale was 3/16” to the foot.  This did not become popular until the NMRA changed the name to S scale.  Before that, other manufacturers were not willing to produce something that was an advertisement for their competitor.  It is said the NMRA decided on S for the name since the scale was in Sixteenths and a scale one inch is one Sixty-fourth of an actual inch.  Since by this time many American Flyer trains were running on O gauge track, but were actually built to a smaller scale than O, it was an easy step for them to change the gauge to S.  This produced a line that was much more to scale for the gauge used.

Another scale that came out of the war was called Table Top, or TT, scale.  This was a scale of 1/10 inch to the foot.  It was also developed by one company, and was another attempt to make the model railroad fit in a still smaller space.  Today there is very little of this size produced, except in Russia and the former eastern block.

Another big effect after the war was the development of low priced houses for the masses.  Many of these were small, but they were bigger than the apartments which had been available.  Therefore, there was room for a model railroad if it wasn’t too big.  That meant the smaller scales became more popular.  The old tinplate Standard gauge disappeared, and Lionel and the other tinplate manufacturers concentrated on O gauge (although Lionel had produced some OO gauge equipment before the war).

About the time slot cars came on the scene another British company produced a smaller scale yet, which they called OOO.  It used a 2 mm scale on 9 mm gauge track.  Some American sets were produced under the name Treble-O-Lectric, and were marketed by Montgomery Ward.  The engines were full width diesels (E units) to accommodate the motors required.  Drive was by rubber band, similar to the Athearn F units in HO.

Again, the scale/gauge combination was wrong, so the Americans changed the scale to comply with the gauge used.  The scale is now 1.9 mm to the foot, and the name of the scale was changed to N.  Interestingly, this new scale did not cut into the older scales so much as it brought new modelers into the fold.  Today HO is the most popular scale and N is second.  O is third in popularity, while S scale, which almost died out for a while, had a revival when S scale narrow gauge (Sn3) became popular.  Sn3 allows construction of a larger scale railroad in the same space as an HO layout.  Much American Flyer equipment is easily convertable to scale use, adding to the popularity of S.  Mârklin developed a smaller scale, Z, for their clientele, and Micro-Trains produces some Z scale American equipment.  As far as OO is concerned, the scale is no longer used in the US, but the gauge survives as On3.  British kit buildings are generally labeled OO/HO, but the actual trains are OO scale.

So much for getting smaller.  It was discovered that, at least in some states, outdoor railroads were feasible in the larger scales.  In southern California in the 1960s, several garden railroads were built to the old tinplate Standard gauge using a scale of 7/16 inch to the foot.  One of these belonged to Dick Wheeler, owner of Model Engineering Works.  He imported a brass locomotive, a Colorado Midland 4-6-0, in this size.  An advantage not available at the time for smaller scales was that a movie camera could be mounted on a flat car in front of the engine and an engineer’s eye view of the layout obtained.  The movie I saw was enhanced by a linkage from the front truck of the flat car to the camera, so that the camera turned as the car went into curves.

An old German toy maker, Ernst Paul Lehmann, decided to get into this business.  They started producing narrow gauge trains running on the old number 1 gauge track (1-3/4 inch gauge), using a scale of 1:22.5.  This scale/gauge combination works out to meter gauge, a popular narrow gauge in Europe.  They called this line Lehmann Gross Bahn, or Lehmann Great Railroad.  We know this today as LGB, and sometimes call it G or F scale.  They accelerated the trend toward garden railroads, but the problem of scale not matching gauge persists, and there are several scales used on this track today.

Over the years several other attempts have been made to correct the scale/gauge combination.  One early attempt was Q scale.  This scale was 17/64” to the foot, and ran on O gauge track.  The large layout at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago was built to this scale.  Recently several groups have been formed to build to prototype standards, such as Proto:48 and others.  There is still some disagreement as to where to start.  Even the larger live steam scales have this problem - in the eastern US 1-1/2” scale track is generally laid to 7-1/4 inch gauge, while the western US uses 7-1/2 inch gauge.  Recent developments in this size include equipment built to 1.6” scale to fit the wider gauge.  Other standards are used in other parts of the world.  Have we progressed?

Doug Herrmann

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