What do you think when you read a headline like "87 Times Smaller than Reality"? While the average person will simply be mystified, among this crowd you know exactly what that means. I had to see more:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000005011954/gullivers-gate-miniature-exhibit.html?hp&clickSource=story-heading&WT.nav=top-news&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=VideoThumb®ion=AColumn
If you haven't tried the 360 series, it allows you to "grab" and turn the image completely around throughout the video. Kind of a party trick, but works rather well when looking at what is essentially a huge layout under construction in Times Square. The first part opens April 7, if you happen to be in NYC soon. The goal is to represent 100 cities in 50 countries with 300 scenes. So a real international flavor. Hard to tell how much model railroading will be involved, but someone is selling a bunch of HO structure kits, vehicles, figures, and other scenery materials.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Well, now that the news is out, maybe that will help promote model RRing, and bring us back from the brink of a dying hobby?
We are saved!
Rio Grande. The Action Road - Focus 1977-1983
HO Scale Google Street View!
You know, if it wasn't for little bitty toy trains, that scale reduction ratio would make no sense at all.
And yet, I believe, it started out "rationally": O scale being 1/4" to the foot. Well, rational to Americans, anyway. Actually, when people decide to build a scale model of something, they first seem to approach it in fractions. Thus maybe someone would say "Let's build it 1/4 as big as the real one." Which, I think, if progressing further, logically leads to a 1/48 ratio. Which got turned into 7 mm to the foot in metric-land. Well, half-turned into metric, 'cause there's still a "foot" in there. But it's awfully close (about 1:43.5 instead of the real ratio of 1:48) if you're talking about the clunky modeling people did back in the REAL olden days. And then someone said that it should simply be halved for a smaller scale. NO. Not the 1/48, which would have been, uh, logical. Giving 1/96. The next step in "halving". No, they stayed with metric-english. And we get a ratio of (drumroll, please):
1:87.085714.........
Of course, that's only true since 1959 (the year of MR's 25th Anniversary--conincidence?), because that was the year the inch-metric conversion ratio was set at exactly 2.54mm per inch instead of sort of/almost/close enough. Before that, the exact conversion ratio was probably a pretty long string of numbers. Too.
And, naturally, these scale ratios might, or might not, be used for track gage.
Ed
Ed,
What furthered this odd situation with HO being 1:87 was OO scale, which is 1:76. The main driver (pun intended) was the fact that the smallest commonly available electric hobby motors at the time required a boiler that was large enough to fit them inside it, practically speaking. As you note, there was much more than this one tidbit, but it's an important one.
Anyway, I finally had time to Google up Gulliver's Gate and they have a nice little website going. One video intro discusses the project, with its director. Also included is an enthusiastic endorsement of it by Stacey Walthers Naffah, who compares its potential to Hamburg's Miniatur Wunderland. So yes, there's trains involved, lots of trains
Mike - you were just a step ahead of me! I was just about to say this could turn into NYC´s own Miniatur Wunderland (providing they add trains ...).
Judging from the pictures, they have to cover some more mileage before they reach the realism of Miniatur Wunderland, though. There have been quite a few attempts to copy it, inside and outside of Germany, but somehow they failed to achieve the atmosphere Miniatur Wunderland makes it into what the name implies. The nearest I have come across is Mr. Porsche´s TraumWerk (DreamWork) near Salzburg - close, but not there, yet.
Miniatur Wunderland´s new Italian section tops it all!
I hope to be able to visit MiWuLa this year and see it!
Ulrich,
Yeah, there's a long way to go before they get to the comprehensiveness of Miniatur Wunderland. GG seems to be taking the same tack, getting a viable portion of things together and operating, then adding on. And the fact that they are citing it specifically makes it clear that's the level of modeling they aspire to, which is a good thing.
Gotta start somewhere, though, and this seems to be a good effort from the beginning.
OK, I went to Gulliver's Gate today. I had a great time. They are still working on it,, but it was certainly worth seeing. I spent over three hours there. I got in for $22 as a senior.
It starts out in Manhattan, kind of stylized with the upper stories modeled as sheets of translucent styrene. They had some passenger trains running beneath. The next section was New England. It was the closest to a model railroad that they had. Next was England and Europe across the aisle. In the next room was Asia, the Mideast and Central and South America.
Different teams built the different sections. It was interesting to see how the models were done, particularly how each group represented water.
Trains ran through each section. Some would say they unified the display. Others would say they didn't belong, particularly cicling the Taj Mahal. Both the trains and the Faller cars and trucks gave everything some interesting animation.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.