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What model railway gauge is best for children?

We would loosely suggest that the best model railway gauge for children is 00 gauge, of course, each child has different tastes and ways of playing, which would influence the answer, but from a purely factual point of view, 00 gauge ticks most the boxes.
Smaller gauges such as N gauge tend to be too fiddly for little fingers and younger attention spans.
Bigger gauges such as 0 gauge, do not have such a big range of products specially designed for children that 00 gauge has and they tend to be more expensive too.
00 gauge is just right. There are some fantastic, beautifully detailed 00 gauge engines out there with
separately fitted detail, DCC operation, lights, sound, bells and whistles, and then there is the other end of the range with very basic moulded detail, primitive mechanisms and best of all low price tags, with just about everything else in between. So it doesn't matter what level your child is at, 00 gauge can accommodate thanks to the sheer amount of choice out there, whether it be rolling stock or scenery there are enough different products on the market to keep young minds occupied. 
What can you expect from a running session with a younger audience?
Well, purists look away now because prototypical is not a fun concept for little ones. Speed definitely is, along with colours, train adventures and cramming cars, people and goods into wagons and boxcars for a ride around the layout, and as for the scale of said objects, any will do!
They also love to watch trains disappear into tunnels or choose to send the train on a different route, but before you get out the modelling materials to create your very own Island of Sodor tunnel network, there are two things you should know. Firstly any delicate scenery WILL get broken and secondly, children tend to get bored if the layout stays the same for too long.
All is not lost though, you can get a huge range of free-standing, portable and sturdy scenery props in 00 gauge, from tunnels to stations, car loading bays to cranes and level crossings to signals. Each time they play, the props can be placed somewhere different, which is all part of the fun and helps them to act out different scenarios.
Children will also like to push cars around, so don't forget to add a few roads to the layout, especially near to a level crossing.
No matter how robust your model trains are there's almost certainly going to be the odd breakage. Have you ever seen a seven-year-old uncouple a £200 locomotive from its carriage? It's enough to make your wallet cringe!
So our advice would be, let the child play with the layout in a way that is fun to them. It definitely will not emulate real life but will create a lot of smiles. Have plenty of free-standing structures that can be moved around to create different adventures and have a couple of different routes and sidings for similar reasons. Use DC to control the trains especially for young children, keep your engines and carriages cheap and cheerful and finally, ALWAYS ALWAYS keep a good supply of superglue in, just in case!
Posted in: Model Railway, Design and Planning

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