Using other than 1/160 scale items on an N layout

[OldEastRR]

Tomy Tec has a bank that I'd love to put in my downtown but how badly out of whack would a 1/150 scale building look around 1/160 scale ones? The downtown is mostly DPM kitbashes. It probably doesn't make much difference if the height of the first floor, the windows, and the columns are larger because banks had varieties of those. The doors are easily replaceable. But would the building have to have a couple of scale feet sliced out horizontally of the middle of the walls to get a N scale floor to floor height correctly? I think they can still be found as kits on eBay.

[peteski]

I don't think it is as difficult as you think. Buildings such as banks, train stations, or commercial builidings often had high ceilings and even doors were taller and wider than typical doors.  I don't think you will have to do any slicing for the building to fit in with the adjacent 1:160 buildings.

[MK]

I agree with Pete.  You can use it as is.  Once you have enough 1/160 stuff around it, your eyes and brain will blend everything in.  The two sizes are close enough.

[Kentuckian]

+1

[bill937ca]

Here is the Tomytec bank with a Wheels of Time Mack bus.

[Mark5]

I have the Tomytec bank and it looks fine in true N scale.

As others pointed out, buildings vary quite a bit dimensionally (windows, etc), so in most cases 1:150 buildings are fine.

Mark

[thomasjmdavis]

Truth be told, especially when it comes to buildings, the "scale" is often arbitrary.  Some manufacturers are very scale conscious, others not nearly so.  You can buy an N scale 14 story building that is 12" tall (pretty close to scale), while on the HO shelf there is 14 story building that is only an inch or two taller.  The bricks of an N scale building can be anything from 1/50 down to 1/200 when you measure them.  So I would say, look at the particular model itself, and don't sweat about what it says on the box.
In the old days, Con-Cor used to import some Heljan buildings that came with 2 sets of doors and marketed them and "HO/N" scale. 

1/144 is about 10% bigger than 1/160- and if you look at any commercial district, you will probably see some buildings that are 10% taller and wider than the buildings next to them, even though they both have the same number of floors.  So I would not worry about it.  And for that matter, a bank is quite likely to have taller than usual doors, so if the doors scale out to 7 or 8 feet tall, certainly not an issue. (Also true for a lot of public buildings or even a department store).

[mmagliaro]

Agree with the rest.  It should work fine as-is.
Think of this.  A standard 80" high door is 0.5" high in N Scale (1/160).  In 1/150, it would be 0.53".  Who is going to detect
a .030" difference on a door height?  That's the kind of thing that might be noticeable
with other small details around it.   For example, if the thickness of a window frame were .030" too large, you'd sure notice it.
If you had one door that was .030" larger than the others all in a row on the same building, you'd notice it.

But if everything is in proportion around it, that difference is not going to show.

[pnolan48]

I too agree. In rural settings with lots of space and scenery, I used Z scale without folks noticing. As another mentioned, N scale buildings come in many different scales, depending on how you measure. I've measured doorways that were anything from 1:135 to about 1:180. Banks in particular often had large doors and windows, along with high ceilings.

Come to think of it, I've always presumed the DPM models were 1:160 and never really measured them. The European makers were all over the lot.

[nkalanaga]

Many older buildings had high ceilings, and tall windows, for better lighting.  Before fluorescent lights became cheap, lighting a business was expensive, and produced a lot of heat.  Without cheap air conditioning, keeping cool in the summer was an issue, so using as much natural light as possible was common.

Also, the high ceilings meant the heat that was produced, either from lights or the Sun, had somewhere to rise, and could be easily vented, rather than cooking the workers and customers.

So, "oversized" buildings were actually quite common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[OldEastRR]

I've seen the bank on another layout but most of the buildings around it were Tomy Tec too, so I couldn't judge the relationship to 160 N. I want a kit, so I can reduce the size of the window frame thicknesses. I may even reduce the length - I want a mid-size town bank.
Then I look at the banks Walthers makes in HO, and see the Walthers site is selling the kits for 64-75% of list --- they can't get rid of all their HO banks but they won't make them in N scale. Especially if the N price is 25% less than the HO, they'd sell lots of them. We have SO much more space to fill in our towns than the HO guys. Grrrrr......

[Rich_S]

I do not have the Tommy Tec bank, but I do have the Tommy Tec Tank car loading platform and it seems to work well with N scale.

[ Guests cannot view attachments ]

Sorry, for the poor quality photo, but as you can see it really does not stick out as over sized compared with the other N scale objects in the photo.

[jpwisc]

I couldn't do it. I got a Tommy Tec gas station and it looked so wrong. I used it as a core, I put a whole new exterior on it, adding proper scale height doors and accessories. 1/144 is definitely not 1/160 for my eyes.

The height of the building is passable. I think that is because the overall dimensions were too small for 1/144, so the overall size worked well for 1/160.

[peteski]

I couldn't do it. I got a Tommy Tec gas station and it looked so wrong. I used it as a core, I put a whole new exterior on it, adding proper scale height doors and accessories. 1/144 is definitely not 1/160 for my eyes.

The height of the building is passable. I think that is because the overall dimensions were too small for 1/144, so the overall size worked well for 1/160.

Carl, Japanese N scale is 1:150, not 1:144. You are confusing it with several other lines of models (like miniature automobiles or model airliners) which are made in 1:144 scale.
But if it didn't look right then to you then that is another thing altogether. 

[Catt]

Back before I radically downsized my N scale layout I used both 160 and 144 vehicles on the layout.I just kept them separated in their own section of the layout.Now that the layout is 1/3rd the size it was I have a whole bunch of vehicles to build a diorama for.