HO figures and buildings for 1/72

With a little careful  consideration and planning you can use HO scale buildings , figs and accessories with 1/72  and 1/76 scale models

As an example I used a building front from DPM Productions in this dio

O scale is about 1/45

G scale or Gauge 1 is about 1/32

Unfortunately scales between trains, modeling, and miniatures don't not match up 1:1. Each has their own standards.

Even within each genre ones company's 1/72 is incompatible with other 1/72's.

You basicly just have to put everything together and see how they look or search around and see how someone else did it.

I don't know what your intentions are but you might also check miniatures (as in war/fantasy gamming) and toys (as in green army men type).

HO scale (1:87)  is approximately 20% smaller than 1:72 scale.   When it comes to figures,  the scale difference is too great visually.     Your six-foot tall HO figure appears to be just 4'8"  when put into a 1:72 scale scene.

Recon I'm going through the same thing trying to match 1/35 and 1/72 to RR scales. There is OO scale that is mostly from the United Kingdon thats about 1/76, very close to our 1/72. I've researched this and for portals, bridges, trestles etc this works great but I haven't seen a lot of figures. For 1/35 I've been checking G scale that has floating measurements but generally its a little larger that 1/35 and O scale is about 1/48.

Try a search for "train scales", this will get you started.

If you find what your looking for and locate some references please post it, we're just starting the Iron Rails GB in January and a lot of us are getting ready. One thing about RR stuff, theres a lot of it and some really cool things, and with a little imagination we can mix both hobbies with some fantastic results. Terry  

Thanks everyone for the good info. I didn't really have anything in mind for a diorama right off hand, but a friend is getting rid of a bunch of train stuff in different scales and I thought maybe I could get some use out of some of them. Maybe a depot loading new Shermans for shipment (No weathering or gear!).

I hope you can get something together, train dio's are cool.

I've used the Roco Minitanks HO 1/76th scale 37mm field piece on the foredeck of my Revell 1/72nd scale PT 109, and it eyeballs OK (although 1/76th scale figures would be too small), so...  

There you only have a 5% difference.

Model railroad scale is confusing, because there are both scale which is the math for the difference in size from reality, and gauge, which is the width between the rails.

And the terms get used indiscriminately sometimes.

Just to give one example. N scale is defined as 1:160. That is because the original manufacturer Arnold used track with a nine mm gauge (0.354 inches), hence the "N", to represent Standard gauge track, which is 4'-8 1/2". Rather arcane on many levels.

And in Britain N scale is 1:148 but that's a unique thing.

Military 1:144 use N scale stuff a lot.

But, N gauge track is used in other scales. For instance Nn3 scale is based on a three foot gauge, so the track sets the scale at 1:102. However in the interests of available accessories, Nn3 models use 1:87 scale (HO) scenery and rolling stock, with the wheel base built at .354 inches. That makes the track gauge scale at 30 inches. And if you are a Nn2 1/2 modeler replicating 2'-6" gauge, it's pretty perfect.

It gets worse, for instance HO (half O) scale is 1:87, although O scale is 1:48.

I generally find scale difference works to about 10% maximum. With three dimensional objects the rule of cubes gets you. thatextra 10% in three directions compounds to a 33% increase in volume and it looks way too big if set right next to true scale.

Reducing scale works great in shadow boxes and dioramas that have a fixed view angle.

Having Z scale 1:220 folks in the background of N scale has a great effect.