Postby sarge » Thu Apr 06, 2017 10:04 am
Nothing meant to be disparaging from here, more as a matter of perspective rather than the rich mythology of O; its for wealthy people, two-rail is harder to wire than three rail, you need big curves, all that stuff that we hear constantly. I always hold the opinion it all really is a collection of "driver's excuses" for the fact you got to build the stuff rather than buy it, but that's an opinion.
To that one Blum advert, a piece of perspective. Historically, that year or two after the war was rife with attempts to get more out of the worth of prewar stuff than it was worth, not just trains but cars, radios, whatever. You are in time between the ending of being urged to spend your discretionary income on war-bonds and your discretionary time on war work and having precious little hobby production started up again. Add to it the military coming home and there was quite a bit of trade of second-hand prewar "luxuries" at demand-will-bear pricing and plenty of people itching to spend money for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Second-hand trade had no price ceilings, which were still in place, BTW. I grew up in the hobby with people who remember this very very well, so not conjecture even though second-hand.
Now, as to a comparison piece by piece between HO and O, that comparison is a bit dangerous too. Simplistically an O model takes eight times the volume of an HO model, so over-simplistically is it eight times the material costs to produce? Certainly I need fewer pieces at four times the footprint, so as a craftsman I can spend as much time detailing and building and enjoying that one piece per unit footprint as four like HO pieces.
Where HO shined wasn't so much the lack of space that people cite after the war. I currently own a little standard postwar Cape and there is plenty of room for O if you want to do O. The shine was when HO became reliable enough such that you could have more stuff in the same space in that home. Over time, the fluke of more product available in HO rather than O attracted the less craftsman-oriented modeller. Even without that double whammy of ease and quantity, N has made some pretty significant inroads just trading on quantity.
The anomaly that doesn't help the "price" case for HO dominance is this next event, the development of reliable N Scale. The pricing per unit has never been all that different between HO and N, so how did N establish so strongly if price was the issue? It isn't. How much you can put in a given space (price per unit area be damned) is the driver.
Now lets look again at the oft cited and fictitious "quantity of space prewar vs. postwar" argument. If HO really was a choice due primarily to amount of space, as the historians would have us believe, the experience in the UK makes no sense at all, for O is huge in Britain, and trust me when I tell you the houses have much less space than almost anything here. O (7mm) in the UK is strong enough to have a very high ratio of domestic product to imported, for example. It's a very different world but the rationale used here doesn't hold up, any more than the notion my butt-common little standard '40s postwar house is somehow got less potential space than what was common pre-war. If anything, the newish concept of putting concrete in the cellar floor rather than dirt gives it more.
So, is O really more expensive (to the point of being for the well-heeled)? By the unit, well yeah it is and always has been more expensive. But when the choice is to focus on the individual models as in the craftsman mould or the quantity of models for the same space available (rarely less) as in the model railroad mould, that individual value judgement really chooses scale to a large degree. The resulting space invested is probably the same for the most part, and the question becomes whether O is more expensive to fill a given footprint (with fewer pieces of higher detail) than HO, then or now.
No-one ever forgets where they buried the hatchet.
