Category Archives: S Scale

Inspiration – and agreement

One of the things which has restored my mojo, and help me through the jungle of diversions to the oasis of focused calm is Trevor Marshall’s rather wonderful blog, about his project to model the CNR’s branch to Port Rowan. It is well worth a visit, but be warned, like many prodigious bloggers, his modelling output is fairly rapid, too. There’s a lot to read…

By pure chance (we never notice coincidences when they don’t happen) his latest post mentions that he weathers his scenery, to produce subtle variation in tone, and take off the plastic look. As you can see, this approach to colour as part of the finescale approach is well worth the effort.

“It’s just the right size”

This is a common comment at exhibitions, almost as common as asking if it is EM or P4!

I have a theory why S is perceived as “the right size”, and it also applies to Gauge 1 in its (proper) 1:32 format. The human eye with the help of the brain measures things via angular displacement, binocular stereoscopy and perspective and as with standard geometry is pretty good at halving angles. If you take a half, and halve it, and halve it, and halve it, you have 1/32nd of your starting point: do it once more, and it is 1/64th of the original. It therefore “fits” just right into the mind’s eye. It’s only a hunch, but there is probably a PhD thesis that could come out of it! Incidentally, this also makes the scale ideally suited to the modern computational era: two to the power 6 is 64, or 100000 in binary….

So, the fact that it suits the eye is probably why people ask if it is EM or P4 – in the mind’s eye, this is the size their 4mm scale should be!