Peter Sardagna said:
Guys, I have a 12'x15' N layout, fully lanscaped, with 140' of track.
I know absolutely nothing about HOn3, but the opportunity to include more detail in my layout intrigues me.
Would it be impractical, or a sacrilge to convert the existing layout to HOn3?
How wide and high are HOn3 rolling stock? (Never even held one in my hand...)
Will they really run properly on N track?
Does N track look so ridiculous that I would I have to lay new track wherever they are visible?
Thank you in advance for your help!
Peter
PS: You can see photos of my layout in the Gallery under Pond Junction and Rocky Creek RR.
Peter
I think you mean HOn30 rather than HOn3. HOn3 track is 10.5mm gauge (3 times 3.5mm/ft) which is correct HO scale for 3ft gauge prototype.
N track has a 9mm gauge, which scales out to just over 30" in HO scale, and is used for HOn30. So both N and HOn30 equipment run on N gauge track. The real issue is horizontal and vertical clearances, as you pointed out. By the way, all these same issues apply when converting from HO to On30. This is called "loading" gauge on the prototype.
The difficulty in telling you how wide and high the HOn30 rolling stock will be is that it depends very much on what prototype you follow or don't follow. Keep in mind that was very little 30" gauge track in the U.S., and almost none of it was common carrier. The 30" prototypes that did exist were built to serve (and usually owned by) a particular lumber company or mine. 3ft gauge was the dominant narrow gauge in the U.S., and 2ft was second - a distant second.
In the early days of HOn30, HOn3 was already well established. At the time, true HOn2 (7mm gauge) was deemed to be too small to make working loco mechanisms. So modelers of 2ft gauge prototypes used HOn30 as a way to obtain working loco mechanisms, track, and wheel sets. The gauge was considered "close enough" for HOn2. So a lot of HOn30 superstructures were built to the 2ft prototype loading gauges, with some allowances for the widened track gauge. Such cars and locos are typically 7ft wide or so, I don't know about height.
HOn30 can also be used to model 3ft gauge prototypes (the track gauge error is the same as for HOn2, but in the opposite direction), or even free-lance (might have been) prototypes. But even within 3ft gauge, the later prototype lines were built for wider, higher, and longer cars than the earlier ones were. Compare tunnel portals on the early 3ft Colorado railroads with the White Pass and Yukon in Alaska - there is a marked difference. Interchange standards never really played any role in the narrow gauge world - there was hardly any to speak of outside of Colorado.
Your safest bet would be to use the NMRA HOn3 gauge as your clearance guide, but this would probably require a lot of unnecessary modifications to your existing layout.
Another, perhaps less painful option would be to go through some issues of
Short Line and Narrow Gauge Gazette, and look at scale plans for 30" and 2ft prototypes. Use some typical measurements until you have built some rolling stock to use as a test. Please report back your results so we can learn from your errors instead of our own!
yours in tea kettles through the woods...