Kato Unitrack and structures ??? 150 or 160

[inobu]

Which scale does Kato use? 1/150 or 1/160. I read where Japan uses 150. Is there a difference in Kato US locos? Are they 160 or everything is 150 from Japan (Kato). 

 

Just trying to get an understanding on what is what. I noticed that some components look off scale at times.

 

Inobu

[David]

Kato buildings made by Kato are 1/150. An exception is if you are actually buying a co-branded package (a building made and sold in another country by another company, which is imported into Japan with the Kato name added to the package - example. Kato does the same thing with accessories like Kato co-branded Microtrains couplers)

 

Kato's Japanese narrow gauge trains are all 1/150 (almost everything except the Shinkansen and a few private railways)

Kato's Shinkansen models (standard gauge) are 1/160

Kato's American models (standard gauge) are 1/160

 

 

Basically Kato, like all Japanese makers, use 1/150 as the default scale for everything, and only use 1/160 for models that run on standard gauge track (Shinkansen and foreign prototypes).

[bill937ca]

For trains 1067mm gauge items (essentially all non-Shinkansen) are 1/150 and Shinkansen are 1/160.  Buildings can vary.  Commercial buildings generally have higher ground floor spaces, banks in particular.  The difference between 1/150 and 1/160 is only 6.25%.  I suspect Kato tells Japan the buildings are 1/150 and the US the buildings are 1/160.  Again the difference for buildings is small. With trains you probably shouldn't have 1/150 directly beside 1/160. 

 

This of course, assumes everything is made to exactly to scale, which it may not be due to chassis size or other factors.  Also North American prototypes are generally wider than Japanese or European prototypes--trams in particular.

[David]

I've seen even the "American" buildings being advertised as 1/150, like the Denny's. I think it's more a case that Kato USA just keeps their mouth shut on issues like building scale and tie spacing. At the end of the day Kato is creating a small selection of foreign prototypes to sell as "exotic" in the Japanese market. The fact that they can sell a few dozen more over North America is an afterthought.

[KenS]

To be fair to Kato, I don't think most "N-scale" buildings sold in the U.S. or Europe are necessarily accurate 1:160 models.  It's not the kind of detail most "rivet-counting" modelers obsess over (unlike the people who take calipers to train models and note errors of fractions of a millimeter), which means the companies that make the models don't have much incentive to make them more accurate. I've certainly read plenty of comments about buildings that were wildly off-scale (and not just in N, HO has the same problem), so a 6.25% difference is negligible..

 

Kato has a hard problem, in that their buildings need to work with both the 1:160 Shinkansen and 1:150 narrow-gauge trains within the domestic market.  I expect they would aim for 1:150, since the Shinkansen models tend to be more removed from buildings, up on viaduct or just on tracks further from the buildings. Selling the buildings in the U.S. and Europe is probably secondary to them, so the scale difference just isn't something they'd worry about (and 1:150 is probably indistinguishable from 1:148 British N).  But I've never measured any to be sure.

 

But in a lot of cases, it doesn't really matter.  Unless you put two buildings of significantly different scale next to each other, or pose a 1:160 figure in the door of a 1:150 building, you probably won't see the difference.  And with 1:150 trains, 1:160 buildings further away will just exagerate the distance, which is desirable.  Some HO layouts use N-scale buildings in the back to exagerate space.

[inobu]

Thanks, That's what I need to know

 

 

Inobu