1825 Josef Ritter von Baader builds a model in the park of the Nymphenberg castle to interest the king of Bayern in a real railroad project. (But he liked the Main-Donau canal better.)
Promotional models are not uncommon in the following decades.
1835 The railway between Nurnberg and Furth is opened, and toy makers in the area make solid castings of the steam wagons.
These are followed by tin plate, wood and cardboard models in the decades to come.
1838 A live steam engine of the Adler type, to a scale of 1:10 running on 144 mm track, probably built by or for a teacher at Dresden's technical school, Rudolf S Blochmann, was in 1998 found under
the foundation of Maximilium in Munchen. It's made from steel and brass, with cast iron wheels and has a spirit burner. (It's now on display at the German Museum in Munchen.)
1862 Josehp, Myers & Co of London becomes the first company to have a steam powered model locomotive in their catalog. Carogatti in Konigsberg becomes the first German company to do so in
1869.
The models of this time always ran on the floor, most were fueled by ethanol. Smallest gauge was 63 mm, but up to 115 mm wasn't uncommon.
1881 Bing starts making flywheel and steam powered models.
1882 Planck shows an electical train model, but this was a little before the technology was mature.
1885 First clockwork toys made by S Guntermann of Nurnberg. All other makers soon follow.
1891 On the Leipzig exhibition, Marklin are the first to have a track system for their clockwork trains.
They ran with fixed speed, but could be stopped with devices between the rails that acted on levers on the locomotive. The track system had straight and curved sections as well as switches. The
sections had two rail joiners at one end, none at the other, adapters with joiners at both ends, or no joiners also existed.
Gauges were standardized: 0 1 2 3
35 mm 48 mm 54 mm 75 mm but as at that time the gauge was measured from the center of the rails, and they were 3 mm wide, subtract 3 mm to get the modern equivalents. Level of detailing was abysmal.
In gauge 0 and 1 the cars didn't even have doors hinted at.
Caretti invents a system with one rail joiner at each end.
All Nurnberg companies adapt the gauges 0, 1 and 2. In USA Ives uses 0 and 1. However lots of companies had gauges between 2 and 3: Bing's gauge 3 was 67 mm and 4 was 75 mm; Shonner's 67 mm was
called IIa; Planck had a 65 mm gauge they called 8.
1898 Shonner becomes the first European company to have an electric streetcar model, companies in USA had been doing so for some time before European compaies caught up.
Three different systems are already in existance: 2-rail, center rail or catenary.
Marklin started just before 1900 with electric streetcars, which soon appear in steam engine form.
1902 Shonner announces a gauge 000 with a 25 mm gauge. This makes us believe that there had been something called 00 by then, perhaps Bing's 28 mm track. All of the early small gauges became
failures, as they were considered too toylike.
1904 The first electric trains in the small gauges 1 and 0 appear, but the motors are still oversize.
Most equipment run on 50-60 V DC. As controllers were mostly used simple resistors directly connected to the house current of 110 or 220 V. Not very safe.
There was already since a number of year an English magazine _Model Engineer_ for hobbyists who built their own scale models, and when the Englishman Basset-Lowke starts collaborating with the German
company Bing, which gets to make models of English prototypes, the transformation of the toy trans into a hobby for adults is started.
1:16 with 89 mm gauge was common among the English hobbyists, but that was a little too large to become practical. The Basset-Lowke models were made to standard gauges, but not to any scale. The
English thought measuring from the center of the rails was stupid, they wanted to measure like the prototype, and the trains kept to a scale corresponding to that.
As the English were influencial, gauges were standardized:
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 32 mm | 45 mm | 51 mm | 64 mm |
| 1:43.5 | 1:30 | 1:27 | 1:23 |
1914-18 The war meant the destruction of most of the German industry. For the surving companies it took about a decade to regain what they had lost.
In England, gauge 0 to 1:43,5 became common, through the makers Basset-Lowke, LMC (Leeds Model Company) and Hornby (Meccano), with input from the model railroad clubs.
In USA, makers Lionel, Ives and American Flyer mainly made Standard Gauge models, which was close to, but not identical to #1 gauge. They also made 0 gauge models. Gauge 1 and 2 were kept to the
German standard.
1923 Basset-Lowke, together with his designer Greenly, introduces what he considers the first table top layout trains. The gauge is 00, 16.5 mm track to the scale 1:76. This small scale is made
possible by the perfection of the method to make thin copper wire, allowing for smaller electric motors in all kinds of machinery. As it now had become practical to build stamped metal track with
roadbed, ties and rails combined, with the centre rail isolated, Bing gets large orders for it from England. But both in Germany and USA the new gauge was largely ignored by the manufacturers.
In USA, the gauge 00 gets a track gauge of 19 mm to fit the scale 1:76.
1935 NMRA is founded in USA, and sets the standards for 0 scale track and wheels, but not the scale. Both 1/4"=1' and 17/64"=1' were widely used to build models to run on 1 1/4" (0) gauge track.
American manufacturers agree that H0 is 16.5 mm track and the ratio 1 foot = 3.5 mm.
Basset-Lowke adjusts the scale to the track gauge and it becomes 1:87.
Trix-Werke in Germany (who was a competitor to Meccano), starts making 16.5 mm track on a roadbed of pressed cardboard, so that all three rails could be isolated from each other, thus permitting two
trains to operate independently on the same track. They ran on 14 V AC, and direction was changed with a pulse of higher voltage. They used a scale of 1:90.
1936 Marklin introduces trains on 16.5 mm track with the centre rail isolated, scale beeing 1:85. The motors had two windings and were run on rectified AC. Depending on what polarity was chosen at
the controller, rectifieres in the locomotive activated either of the two windings, thus controlling direction of travel. This didn't work too well, so Marklin adopted the Trix system. Marklin does
not call this scale H0 until after the 1939-45 war.
1938 American Flyer starts producing models to 1:64 scale, but keep the same track gauge as 0.
What is to become S gauge, 1:64 models on 7/8" track, is introduced by Cleveland Manufacturing under the name C-D gauge.
After the war American Flyer drops 0 and H0 and offer 1:64 trains on S gauge 2-rail track. Lionel abandons 00 gauge.
(Some German names in this article really have umlauts: Nurnberg, Nuernberg; Shonner, Shoenner; Marklin, Maerklin; Furth, Fuerth; Guntermann, Guentermann.)
By Urban Fredriksson, 1991-2 (with input from others),
additional material 1997,98.