Having fun with model railways in a way you probably never thought of.

What is Gnine? An introduction.

Gnine. Pronounced "nine", (the G is silent) is a definition covering the modelling of miniature railways with N gauge track.

The G stands for GARDEN and so applies to ALL popular garden railway scales. Those typically are considered to be: 7/8", SM32, 1:20.3, 1:22.5, 1:24, 1:32, 1:35 and the various O scales. Though the O scales using N gauge track have been modelled by many people already and don't really need to be covered here.

Likewise there are many miniature railway gauges. From 3 1/2" sit on trains to 15" gauge lines like The Ravenglass and Eskdale and the railways of Sir Arthur Heywood.

So, lets put all these scales up against N gauge track and see how they measure up to the prototype

Name Scale (mm/ft) Ratio 9mm equals nearest prototype gauge
7/8" 22.22mm  1/13.7 4.85" 5"
16mm 16mm 1/19 6.73" 5" & 7.25"
Large Scale 15mm 1/20.3 7.20" 7.25"
G scale 13.5mm 1/22.5 7.97" 7.25" & 9.5"
Half inch 12.7mm 1/24 8.50" 7.25" & 9.5"
1:25.4 12mm 1/25.4 9" 9.5"
1:29  11mm 1:29 10.27" 10.25"
Gauge 1 10mm 1/32 10.8" 10.25 "& 12"

 1:35

 8.7mm

 1/35

 12.5"

 12.25"

As you can see many of these scales measure up very favourably against prototype miniature railways with some very handy compromise scales too.

1:25.4 is not a popular scale though it has gained recognition of late through Christopher Paynes English exhibition layout "Sutton Wharf". For me the big selling point of the scale is 12mm = 1ft or 1mm = 1inch. This is so blindingly simple. We at Gnine.info are surprised its not more popular.

1:29 scale is the scale used by Aristocraft in the USA for their garden railway range. This scales out almost exactly to 10.25 inches. They do some quite nice figures and many of the Christmas village accessories made by people like Lemax scale out quite close to this too.

1:35 scale is the scale used by military vehicle modellers.

You can identify the scale you are actually modelling in by adding the scale ratio in parentheses after the Gnine wording. So if you modelled in G scale then your models would be described as Gnine(1:22.5) or Gauge 1 would be Gnine(1:32).

So basically the term Gnine is a "catch all". There are very few modellers choosing to model in these scales so this is a way to bring them all together.

Lets now move on to the FAQ section and answer some of the more practical modelling questions

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