Why 3-rail O scale?
So I have this really nice model railroad with an interesting oper-
ating scheme, realistic scenery, and structures, and with nicely
weathered trains. Why the heck did I build it in 3-rail? Well, like
many in my age group, I had Lionel toy trains as a boy. After college
came a few years living in small apartments. For our first Christmas
together, my wife surprised me with an Atlas N scale PRR train set.
Yes, she’s definitely a keeper!
I built a series of three N layouts over 10 years, the last of
which was to have all handlaid code 40 rail on wooden ties for
all exposed track. I got about 80% of the main line laid, but
that layout never got beyond the benchwork with roadbed and
track. All the N scale layouts were based on the Pennsy. While
I was working on the third layout, my son turned three years
old. We got my old Lionel trains from my folks’ house and set
them up. He and I had two 3-rail toy train layouts in that house,
and I found myself spending more time on those and less on
the N scale. A job transfer to Ohio in 1992 provided the oppor-
tunity to get a full basement for a layout.
Once I realized that I was going to build a basement, and thus
would have the whole thing for a railroad, I thought about scale.
Believe it or not, I've never really been interested in HO. I think
that’s because it is the "majority" scale with many really fine lay-
outs of all sizes. If I built a really nice HO layout, it would just be
another one of many. I thought VERY briefly about returning to N,
but discarded this because of questionable running reliability (al-
though N runs really well today, compared to when I was in it), and
because I didn’t want to keep a basement full of track clean to the
degree required in N scale.
That left O scale. I had some experience with 3-rail toy-train layouts
at the time, but not with any scale modeling in O. There were some
scale brass 3-rail PRR steam locomotives that had been released.
