Model railway scales

Ok kiddo, have you ever seen a toy train set? Well, there are lots of different sizes that toy trains can be made in, and these different sizes are called scales.

The most common scales are:

- HO (which stands for Half-O)
- N
- O
- G

Now, imagine you have a real train and you want to make a toy version of it. If your train is really big, like a freight train, then you'll need a big toy train to match it, right? That's where the different scales come in - they help us make toy trains that are the same size, or scale, as the real trains they're based on.

The most popular scale is HO, and it's about half the size of O scale. If you see an HO scale toy train, it will be about the same size as a Barbie doll. Other scales, like N and Z, are even smaller - a toy N scale train would be about the size of your thumb!

So when people talk about model railway scales, they're just talking about how big the toy trains are. And by using different scales, we can make sure that our toy trains are the right size for whatever real trains we're trying to recreate.