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someone recently gave me some Lionel cars, ( a box car and a gondola ) they are supposed to be "O" gauge but they are about 1 1/2 inches shorter and somewhat narrower and not as high as the ones I got as a kid which are "O" guage? Are there two different sizes of "O" gauge?
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Yes. In Lionel there is O guage, and O-27 guage. O-27 means that a circle of track has a DIAMETER of 27 inchec to the outside of the ties, while (Lionel) O-guage has a diameter of 31 inches to the outside of the ties. There is also O-41 (K-Line) and O-72 (Both Lionel and K-line). These are what are known as "TINPLATE" (or toy) trains. O guage SCALE is something else again, with cars and loco's scaled to 1/4 inch equals 1 foot of the prototype. There are also some variations in scale O guage - 1/4 " = 1 ft., 17/64 " = 1 ft, and now PROTO48 in whice everything is built to exact scale. By the way - normal O-guage is run on a tract that is 1 1/4 inches in guage - therefore a 5 foot guage, which is why there are the 3 (maybe more, I don't know) variations in O guage.
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