Category:H0-gauge

French Hornby HO catalogue [image info]

H0 gauge model trains, rolling stock and accessories.

The museum has a selection of around twenty H0-gauge pre-war Märklin locos and rolling stock, but also has some earlier pieces where although the track is 00/H0 (or close), it's not obvious whether the scale of the moving pieces is technically 00 or H0 ... so you may also like to check the "00" listings.

00- and H0-scale

Both 00-scale and H0-scale formats use essentially the same track, designed to be half the width of gauge 0 (~7mm/foot). However, due to the difficulty of miniaturising clockwork and electric motors, and producing fine-scale wheels on early models trains that would run reliably, Henry Greenly argued that in order to accommodate the broader wheels that were thought to be necessary for stability, the rest of a model British locomotive with external pistons and drive gear couldn't be implemented properly at the "true" half-scale 4mm/foot scale that matched the track. As a result, the 1920s Bing Table Railway system, designed as a joint venture between Bassett-Lowke Ltd. in the UK and Bing Werke in Germany, used oversized superstructure designed to 4mm/foot, and this became 00-gauge.

4mm/foot was also used by Trix Twin Railway in the mod-1930s (again with Greenly's input), and was then adopted by Hornby Dublo, becoming the standard UK small scale.

However, over on the Continent, Märklin came to produce their half-scale system a little later than Bing, and with the advantage of later improvements in engineering were able to produce "proper" 3.5mm/foot locos on the same size of track. This became known as H0 (apparently for "Half-0").

Hornby Dublo and ACHO

Because each format had slightly different-sized third-party accessories (such as railway stations), the UK model railway community standardised on 00 and Continental Europe adopted H0. While Meccano Ltd. in the UK produced 4mm scale "Hornby Dublo" (pronounced "Double-Oh"), their French sister company produced 3.5mm scale trains, and branded them similarly, aS "ACHO" (pronounced "H-Oh").