After making acquaintance with Barry Norman and his waybreaking Petherick layout on the railexposition in Den Bosch the latent railway virus resurfaced. This wellknown layout can be viewed upon as the introduction of art into railway modelling. It was the start for the design of my station Spaubeke. Basically I had started making homemade points as early as 1974 using standard code 80 rail. Home built track didn't have any secrets by that time and decided was to built Spaubeke with code 55 rail. Not to Fremo standards as I only became aware of FREMO N by the end of 1991.
About the same time was my first acquaintance with N-gauge finescale on reading an article about Keith Armes' Chipping Norton layout in the english magazine Railway Modeller december 1991. The accompanying trackside foto's were enough to become member of the 2 mm Scale Association in order to home in on this phenomena. A trip to the next 2 mm Expo in England did the rest. A revelation was the expertise in Engeland to built to finer standards and the building of your own running material. It is nice to know that these 2 mm standards pre-date the introduction of continental N by more than a decade. So actually there is nothing new under the sun. To see how these standards could be used for 1:160 N scale a modulair testtrack was decided on. These english standards were more advanced than the practised standards within Fremo. The proposal for the current state of the art FREMO fiNe-scale standard dates from mid 1992. The autumn meeting in Eindhoven that year saw light to the first actual outing of what nowadays my module Splitveld Fabriek is. And with that the first seeds were sawn with the visual appearance of fiNe-scale double slip and normal pointwork.
One of my motto's is that standards only exist to be able to say you do things differently. This also accounts fully for the N gauge NEM standard. Although basically the NEM standard has such wide tolerances that you can hardly speak of a standard, even then not one manufacturer fully complies with it. The normal FREMO N practise is based on a coherent set of dimensions within the NEM standard that will give the best possible visual appearance. This means that the railheight is the minimum allowed and based on code 40. In order to give trouble free running on this, the flange height of the wheels is reduced to about 0.5 mm. The same holds for pointwork with the minimum dimension of the flangeway set to 0.85 mm. This already brings an enormous step forward in appearance of track. However it doesn't bring much on the appearance of steamloco's. If you make use of soldered code 40 track then it is in principal possible to use ready to run material straight from the box without flange reduction. This doesn't hold for the American plastic flexrail or models from the stone age of N.
If you also want to get rid of the steamroller wheels under your loco's the FREMO fiNe-scale standard is of interest. This is based on an analogy of the 2 mm standard. Using a tire width of 1.0 mm + 0.3 mm flange width giving a nominal width of 1.3 mm. The smaller flange width leads to a much wider dimension between the flanges, a nominal width of 8.2 mm instead of 7.4 mm for NEM. The flangeways in pointwork can therefore be reduced to 0.5 mm maximum width. The flangeheight is here reduced to a maximum of 0.5 mm however on loco's a nominal 0.3 mm is advised. Apart from the visual improvement on your loco, you also obtain extra framewidth, which you will apreciate when you start to built your own loco's. And, when your modelling reaches this stage, you will realize that it just takes as much effort to built a much better looking fiNe-scale loco as one standard wheels. To me that makes it an easy choice. Also to adapt NEM wheels to fiNescale standards is as much effort as making them suitable to Fremo N. The only difference is to reduce the flanges as well as in width as in height. At the same time the standards are however not that fine that you need special tools or exceptional effort to reach you goal. Such would be the case if real scaled down values would have been chosen. The drawback is of course that pointwork is no longer compatible with standard N. A fiNe-scale loco will not run reliably on NEM width pointwork as the other way around a normal loco is not able to pass a fiNe-scale point. However this is not a large drawback as with the introduction of the new Fremo N coupling all rolling material is no longer interchangeable with normal N. That makes fiNe-scale the only sensible option in the long run.
Personally I find trackbuilding one of the nicest stages in railway modelling. You are still in the creative phase of starting a new project and see things grow under your hands. Nowadays code 40 rail is the only practised option for Fremo N. This means that you need to orientate yourself into the world of trackbuilding to get some background information about the practise of your chosen railway company. This because homebuilding your pointwork is the only viable entry into code 40 tracklaying. Some knowledge about the distance of sleepers, scale drawings of points, trackbeds and such information will not do any harm at all. For building normal track there are in principal two options: loose components and american flexrail. I generally prefer to fully lay my own track from components instead of using flexrail. Particularly the adaptation of flexrail by cutting the interconnections between sleepers and removing the superfluous number of sleepers is a bit boring. The imitation of railspikes is the only pro for flexrail. Today you even have choices in how you built your pointwork. If you model to DRG/DR/DB standards (or can live with those) you can make use of the precut sleepering beds and soldering jigs as developed by Jens Emmerman. If the DRG templates do not fullfill your choice then you are left with the alternative. This is to use loose components such as sleepers cut from pcb board and code 40 rails. For this last method scale drawings are necessary. There are two options to obtain pcb sleepers, either cut them yourself using an circular diamond saw or become member from the 2 mm SA and order all point components in England. Guess what I do. Combinations of wooden sleepers and pcb board are also feasible. The time investment per point is probably slightly in favour of the template sleepering bed method although if set out to it, you can built a standard point under 2 hours from loose components. But that certainly will not hold for your first point!
To make the first step into fiNe-scale easier, the members of FREMO N are continuously researching methods and ways to obtain industry support for essential components. Several developments such as the ordering of wagonwheels, etched components for the new coupling are currently under investigation. So don't hesitate and take a jump into the world of fiNe-scale.
author: Henk Oversloot
date: 10 february 1999