Wide Gauge
This article is about a rail gauge for toy trains. For real-life rail gauge wider than standard gauge, see broad gauge.Wide Gauge was an early
model railway and
toy train rail gauge, introduced in the
United States in
1906 by
Lionel Corporation. As it was a
toy standard, rather than a
scale modeling standard, the actual scale of wide gauge locomotives and rolling stock varied. It ran on
three-rail track that was 2 1/8 inches (nearly 54 mm) apart.
Lionel dubbed its new standard
Standard Gauge and trademarked the name. Lionel's Standard Gauge should not be confused with
Standard Gauge for real
railroads, or the later 1:64 scale
S gauge popularized by
American Flyer after
World War II. Due to the trademark, Lionel's competitors mostly called their similar offerings Wide Gauge.
Historians disagree on Lionel's reason for creating Standard Gauge, giving two stories. One story is that Lionel misread the specifications for
Märklin's European Gauge 2, measuring the distance between the inside portion of the rails rather than between the centers of the rails as Märklin did, thus accidentally making a slightly larger and incompatible standard. The other story is that the change was a deliberate effort to lock out European competition by creating incompatible trains. While many believe the latter is more likely, since several U.S. companies such as
Carlisle & Finch were producing trains to that standard, no definitive proof in favor of either theory has ever surfaced.
Whatever the reason for its initial creation, Lionel's Standard Gauge caught on at the expense of Gauges 1 and 2. No fewer than four American competitors adopted Lionel's gauge:
Ives in
1921,
Boucher in
1922,
Dorfan in
1924, and American Flyer in
1925. While all the manufacturers' track was the same size and the trains and buildings approximately the same scale, the couplers for the most part remained incompatible, making it impossible to mix train cars from different manufacturers without modification.
The increased number of manufacturers seemed to give legitimacy to Lionel's gauge, and because the boom of the 1920s made large toy trains affordable, Wide Gauge had its heyday in the mid-1920s only to virtually disappear during the
Great Depression. Ives filed for bankruptcy in
1928 and its offerings were off the market by
1932. American Flyer discontinued its Wide Gauge trains in
1932. Dorfan went out of business in
1934. Lionel discontinued Standard gauge trains in
1940. Boucher, the last of the Standard/Wide gauge manufacturers, folded in
1943.
O gauge, which was smaller and less expensive to manufacture, thus became the most popular scale in the United States almost by default.
However, Standard gauge managed to survive in
South America.
Doggenweiler, a firm in
Chile, produced a small quantity trains in Standard gauge and Gauge 2 from
1933 until about
1960. Standard gauge also was revived in the United States in the
1950s by the small firm of
McCoy Manufacturing, who produced trains of original design well into the
1990s. In the
1970s,
Williams Electric Trains began producing and marketing reproductions of Lionel trains of the
1920s and
1930s. This line was later marketed by Lionel itself, and is now produced and marketed by
MTH Electric Trains.
A number of smaller manufacturers, mostly one- and two-person operations, hand-build and market reproductions of very early Standard gauge trains.
*
Broad gauge
