Talk:OO gauge

HO/OO Compatibility

I came to this page to try to find out if, and how, these two gauges are compatiible. May I suggest some content on this issue? Tatty 02:04, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Double Oh or Double Zero?

The article uses the zero character throughout, but the title uses the letter O. The external links point to one site that is called "Double [letter] O Gauge Association" and a site about the history of "Double [number] 0". Google turns up more pages referring to the letter. I know nothing about model railroads, but I would like to get this article consistent in the most common use of the term. Anyone know? - grubber 23:36, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

No responses here or at Rail tranport modelling, so I am going by Google's results and changing the characters to the letter O. - grubber 05:04, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

grubber: The original and correct notation is 00, which like the 0 and H0 (half-0) standards are progressions from the older 3, 2 and 1 gauge standards. OO, O and HO should still be present as redirects since they are widely used. But they are not the correct notations so they don't deserve to override the 0 notations as titles in an encyclopedia, even if there are more people who think the name is O and write that than there are people who write 0. I have corrected the article to use 0 notation, keeping it consistent with the 0 scale article. And I believe this article should be moved to the name 00 gauge, with 00 scale, OO gauge and OO scale as redirects. See also Talk:O_scale WinTakeAll (talk) 03:25, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not gonna touch this article, since I'm American and OO is primarily a British phenomenon, however it should be noted that the "correct" usage in North America is indeed OO, as defined by the NMRA (see: http://www.nmra.org/standards/sandrp/pdf/S-1_2.pdf). You guys do with it what you will... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.90.45.10 (talk) 10:10, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Intorduction

I think the the introduction focuses too much on EM and P4. A brief comparison is usefull but more than half the introduction covers this. Maybe this could be moved into a new section?

Zabdiel 09:03, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

I've now done this --Zabdiel 09:36, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Model railway scale/gauge ratio naming conventions (zero or Oh)

Hi All

The letter Oh in scale/gauge ratio naming conventions should not be used. The correct character to be used in all of this is the numeric zero.

This is from the historic fact that when the Gauges 3, 2 and 1 were prevalent before the second world war and a smaller one was introduced they used the progressively smaller number of 0 (zero) as in Gauge 0. When the scale and gauge was halved for the new table top railway (literally half Gauge 0) the term H0 was used. The second character being a zero.

The confusion has set in with the pronounciation of this zero as Oh as in reciting a telephone number in the UK.

The situation has not been helped in that Hornby-Dublo was used as a brand name for a 00 range of models.

All naming conventions should reflect this use of the number zero.

Examples used in the UK market are as follows: 0 gauge, 0n16.5 gauge, 0n14 gauge, 0n9 gauge, 00 gauge, 00n9 gauge, H0 gauge, H0n9 gauge and 000 gauge. Other ratios of course are G, S, P4, EM, P87, TT, N and Z which are not affected by this.

The use of the term 'scale' is rarely used in the UK. The most popular UK model railway magazine and longest in print Railway Modeller, along with its sister magazine Continental Modeller, use the above terms correctly when describing a particular scale/gauge ratio which can trace its origin back to Gauge 0.

Thus all naming conventions within Wikipedia should in this context change to use the number zero instead of the letter Oh.Adrianmc 18:54, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

• Your basic premise is misguided. The notations "OO gauge", "O gauge" or "HO gauge" are used across myriad sources. The fact that this practice arose from a misnomer is immaterial, it has become widely accepted and entrenched. To think you can just whisk it away with a flick of a wand, to stuff the genie back into the bottle, it is presumptuous. If you look at Google hits, the versions with O's instead of 0's are clearly more popular. The variation between 00 and OO (and similarly for other gauges) is an undeniable fact and any efforts to remove mentions of it is either misbegotten historical idealism or blatant idiocy. --Agamemnon2 19:40, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

There is no variation between 00 and OO they are just different naming conventions for the same thing. However that does not preclude us from standardising on one within this forum, making sure that the redirects are in place so that someone searching finds the information they require. If we are going to standardize on one why not choose the one that is more historically accurate. The aim behind this is to remove confusion, surely a good thing. If we really wished to be pedantic the words "scale" and "gauge" should not be used at all as these naming conventions denote a relationship between a particular scale and gauge and are not exclusively one or the other. In some instances the naming conventions will also define a particular set of standards which would include rail height, wheel back to back etc, an example being P4 in the UK. Adrianmc 06:50, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

The fact that there are two conventions for naming is evidence of variation in terminology. As is the far that neither is universally accepted (consider, for example, [1], [2] or [3], examples of manufacturers and hobbyists in the UK using the "incorrect" OO notation). This must be documented. We should strive for exactitude, not clarity. The basis of standardization on this encyclopedia (not a forum) ought to be the consensus of usage, not historical minutiae. Since there is no consensus, we must arbitrarily choose one alternative and strive to make the prevailing conflict evident. --Agamemnon2 11:33, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

The leading UK manufacturer of this primarily UK gauge for decades, Hornby, refers to it as "00" on its website and this is historically correct as well - it was originally a number. Moreover the European NEM standards refer to it as "00". The article uses "00", so this suggests the title probably ought to be moved back. --Bermicourt (talk) 17:31, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

According to the Rules of Wikipedia (I didn't invent them) if there is a discussion about usage, the article should be changed back in the first used way (this being 00) and from there we can discuss the usage of OO. So can it be changed back to 00, please?195.169.227.2 (talk) 22:39, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Citations

I've added the {{fact}} template where I think citations need to be added. --09:42, 23 August 2007 (UTC)