T Gauge Trams

[cteno4]

Ok here is the other big news i got from Adarsh that i have not heard before. Eishindo is working on T gauge trams and street track! The street track has been prototyped and is working and they are playing with some tram ideas now. since most of this is in development they wont let out a lot of specifics, but as usual Harai san does not like to share much on details or show things off until they are throughly tested!

 

this is great though as a tiny t gauge street car layout would be wonderful. paper models work so well at t scale as printed textures at that scale give you some visual depth you just dont get at larger scales with it at n scale. although its going to be a killer in cost to load in all the automobiles you will need! but the fun thing is that they even have a t scale auto with an open door, a must for street scenes! never see that much at all in other scales!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[IST]

I would say it is a very interesting news, but I think I wwon't try it. I have a basic oval set with a 4 car EMU from the first(?) series and I am not convinced with T gauge. It is too small to me. But I am very curious how it will look like, how good runner would be the tram, and of course how can make a "big" city in this size.

[bill937ca]

T gauge is just too small. No thanks.

[cteno4]

could be quite fun! this may get me back into doing t gauge again. i am worried about the cost of autos as they aint cheap in t scale and you have to paint them! there are some architectural castings but they are not great.

 

could just breed and train some beetles to follow a line in the road and just put little paper tram housing on their backs as an alternative. all it would take to run them would be your apple core from lunch!

 

jeff

[brill27mcb]

could be quite fun! this may get me back into doing t gauge again. i am worried about the cost of autos as they aint cheap in t scale and you have to paint them! ... [snipped]

 

jeff

 

Jeff, it can't be more than a drop or two to paint each car! 

 

Rich K.

[3railgreg]

got me to look into T gauge further. Pretty cool little scale! Hmmmmmmm

[cteno4]

we get a lot of folks google eyed at our little t gauge loop the club displays at shows. folks are really amaazed. the joke is T is for Teeny tiny scale (guess would be TT scale!) and that the set comes with a swing arm magnifying glass! its been a slow evolution, but they keep working out more and more kinks in the system and improving it over the last few years. it is a big fiddly being that small, but i have huge mits of hands and fingers and i can work on them w/o much issue. ive had a friends 9 year old daughter get up to speed with t gauge stuff in 10 minutes and she spent hours on her own playing with it doing different layouts and re-railing cars, coupling cars, etc.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[nik_n_dad]

We got Nik some T-Guage stuff a couple of years ago, and he's enjoyed it- a novelty thing.  It's been fun for him in that he can take track, cars, power supply on trips, and it fits in less than a cigar box.  I bought some buildings for him too, and maybe after we get the n-scale layout done (hahahaha) we may try making a briefcase layout.  I was amazed at the detail in the accessories.

[Martijn Meerts]

Would love to do some mini-modules for T, but I guess those'd be more like micro modules ;)

 

Someone just needs to come up with a T-scale decoder :)

[cteno4]

when t first rolled out is did a bunch of playing with t scale micro modules to see what would be pleasing to the eye as ttrak folks were just scaling everything off of n gauge. with the stuff ive done with architectural and exhibit models it was always really clear that your scope has to match the scale or things just dont look right. i cut up a bunch of different sized pieces of foam core and some little blocks of wood about the size of buildings and had some lumps of lichen for trees along with a small handful of t scale building i had and fiddled.

 

turned out that really little modules about 3" long and larger modules like 10-12" long were the most pleasing for the chunks of scene you could do in t scale. things in between just really felt wrong, hard to express in words it was one of those things you have to look at and just know intuitively its just right or not. i think it has to do with your eye's field of view and how close you tend to get with t scale. t scale screams to put your face right up on it a lot. i think the small modules probably grab the eye and are what your brain likes for a close focused in look at a tiny scene, something probably just cool about it being such a miniature display (doll house effect). the larger modules were cool i think as you could have quite a bit of stuff on that sized module, even though it was less scale area than an ntrak module it felt at least an n trak module's worth of scene. again one of these odd things with scale that fiddles with the minds eye.

 

another thing that i noticed is that long skinny scenes also seemed to lend themselves to ttrak. ive not found this to be true so much with long ttrak skinny scenes where its one 3x or 4x module at standard depth, in n scale it feels like a hot dog. but in T scale it didnt feel that way.

 

the other thing that i noticed was that mixing small and large modules looked interesting. it sort of did some sort of mosaic that was pleasing to the eye. again in n scale ttrak when you have a hodge podge of sizes (usually not a lot of change though in ttrak), it rarely looks really good and usually can look a little shabbier. probably also that you are taking in a much larger area in a standard 2-3' view in t scale than n scale.

 

last thing was that 30 and 45 degree modules looked really appealing in t scale. 90 and 180 were similar challenges as in n scale for scenes. but the 30 and 45 modules then could make a very interesting snaking modular layout thats harder to do with larger scales due to space in most modular setups like ttrak or book shelf modules. this also probably tied into the above thing about the different sized modules above looking interesting.

 

anyhow its worth fiddling with. when i get back into the t scale stuff i want to do some more experimenting with it. ive thought it fun to maybe do a longer point to point modular set up (hey you get the free reversing units with t scale!) that would go down a long table or two. you could even have a couple of point to points linking at stations with a city at one end, with interurban trains out to a suburb station and from that station a different point to point going out into rural area.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

The thing that worries me most about T-scale is the running characteristics. I know you can't expect the trains to run perfect at that scale, but trains continuously stalling is my number 1 annoyance. I've gone so far as to toss a locomotive out the window because it won't run more than 2cm without stalling ;)

 

Maybe a visit to Adarsh could be interesting next time I'm in DC :)

[Guest ___]

I love my T-gauge. I need to whip them out one of these days and run them as it has been a while.