T-Gauge - Model Railroader Magazine

Sir Madog, for some reason I thought you were in Europe.  However, I have been wrong before.

Anyway, I remember HO being about 68% in the US, N scale 24% or so, and the rest is the rest - of course, this are misremembered numbers from the ol' Model Railroader Beginner's articles they used to publish in the December issues (complete with side-by-side comparsions of scale - I think the last article used UP F-units, LGB by O by S by HO by N...and probably Z) - OK, let's say HO is big IN THE US, N scale is fairly popular, O scale is also popular, S scale is a figment of someone's imagination, and so on - of course, people can have multiple layouts in different scales (the artchtype of this is someone with an HO or N scale indoor layout, and a G scale outdoor layout).. Now, N scale is the most popular in Japan (no idea about other Asian countries), while OO is the most popular in the UK (and, to make matters worse, their concept of N scale is called N-gauge, 1:148 vs 1:160 normal N scale)

Now, speaking of Niche, I'd like to link to this Wiki article about current Railroad Model Scales - you can find lots of niches in there, too many of them seem to be here's some random gauged track, lets scale our models to fit some preconcieved notion of what that scale should be - Garden scales seem to be the most guilty of this, using 45mm between railheads I see 1:13.7, 1:20, 1:22.5, 1:24, 1:32...and Wiki just throws it's hands in the air when it comes to G scale, saying it ranges from 1/19 to 1/29 - that's no help.  HO scale, OTOH, remains at 1:87 (they forgot the .1 in that list - 1:87.1) thru-out, but has different gauges to represent narrow gauge railroads (HOn3, HOm, HOn2, HOe) and so on.

Ugh, N scale seems to suffer from 'scalylexia' too - besides British 1:148, wiki states that much Japanese narrow-gauge stock is 1:150 scale, while the standard gauge stock is 1:160 - great, two different scales on the same layout - talk about Niche. I wonder, looking at the Wiki for N scale, a German company Arnold introduced N scale in 1962. So, clearly they chose 9mm as the width of the dominate prototype gauge in Germany (and North America, and most of Western Europe outside of the Iberian Pennisular and Ireland). Why did the Japanese manufacturers not simply introduce a narrower (7mm?) track to represent their dominant gauge (3'6" 'narrow' gauge), and retain the 9mm for standard gauge?  This could have been done even back in the mid-1960s