Error!

[underworld]

From information I've seen about Marklin and Lionel the 2 1/8 ( 2.125 ) measurement was initially a mistake......but then was seen as a way to push more sales of Lionel product.

underworld

[:D][:D][:D][:D][:D]

[lionelsoni]

Fifty-four millimeters is 2.126 inches, give or take half a micron.

Cowen did pretty well selling trains; but he was not infallible. If he had held onto his patent of the flashlight, or if he had been able to sell the "only draftless fan ever made" (by his own admission) that provided the motors for his first trains, we might never have had Lionel trains.

No one seems to know for sure; but I think it is plausible that standard gauge was a mistake, in a class with upside-down signal heads, backward water scoops, wrong driver and return-crank quartering, and other unnecessary Lionel errors that cannot be blamed on the exigencies of toy manufacturing but could have been avoided with only the slightest research effort.

[Anonymous]

The 2-1/8" measurement for Standard Gauge was no mistake on JLC's part. He purposefully chose that gauge to thwart the sale of European imports in the U.S. When it came to displaying marketing savvy, Joshua Cowen didn't make too many errors.

[Anonymous]

Here's a link to a site will really confuse you guys:
http://rail.felgall.com/scale.htm
BillFromWayne
www.modeltrainjournal.com

[3railguy]

Everybody is wrong here. Lionel standard gauge track is 54 milimeters between the outside rails.

[lionelsoni]

It seems unlikely that JLC intended standard gauge to be 2 1/4 inches between centers, since the gauge itself is said to have been a misinterpretation of Maerklin's #2 gauge. If we can believe the anecdote from the history books, he took Maerklin's 2 1/8 center-to-center measurement and, by mistake, implemented it as 2 1/8 inches between the railheads, resulting in (approximately) 2 1/4 inches between centers. Since the result could not be called #2, he named it "standard", in a stroke of marketing genius.

[trigtrax]

QUOTE: Originally posted by tintrax

the same catalogs claimed that 0 gauge was 1 3/8th inches!

1 3/8" is the distance from rail center to rail center. This is the way I think of track as I build my products for it (see www.steeltoys.com ). Scale hobbyists and real Railroad people think of gauge as the distance between the inner edges of the rail head.

In Lionel tubular O and O-27 track the center distance rail to rail is the same (1 3/8" ) but because the diameter of O gauge tube is larger O Gauge is actually a narrower "Gauge" than O-27.

Likewise rail to rail center in standard Gauge Track is 2.250" but Gauge is 2.125"

[TexasEd]

Missing a 1.

1/8th is .125

[Anonymous]

On the Classic Toy Trains web site there is an error! Under the section Layouts and Collecting - Basics of Toy trains - there is an article by John Grams on Scale and gauge. Standard gauge is said to be 2.25 inches between running tracks. Of course it is 2 1/8th inches Hardly of earth shattering importance but should be right I reckon! -or am I just becoming a grumpy old man? Disregard the fact that some Lionel catalogs claimed it was 2.25 inches, the same catalogs claimed that 0 gauge was 1 3/8th inches!