Big Trains getting bigger - that is the hobby is! This "Buyers' Guide" is dedicated to people who are getting into "Big Trains," including:
- O Gauge Trains - These are the traditional Lionel trains that run on 3-rail track and which dominated the toy and model train market for the first fifty-five years of the last century. They probably ran around more Christmas trees than all other brands put together. They are the biggest trains that most people can practically use for permanent railroads or Christmas villages indoors.
- Garden Trains. These are even bigger, and mostly used outside. These are also called G Gauge, G Scale, Large Scale, and Gauge One. Some folks also call all of them "LGB" because that's the biggest brand. Incidentally, they look great around a Christmas Tree, but most folks don't have room for these indoors. Links to this page will actually take you to our Garden Train Store site.
- On30 trains are nearly the same size as O gauge trains, but they run on HO track. This scale had been around for decades, but was seldom used until Dept 56 commissioned Bachmann to make a train set that looked good with their villages. Nowadays most of these are available directly from Bachmann, but a few are being made in collector's versions for Bradford Exchange's Hawthorne Village colletion.
- S Gauge trains were pioneered by American Flyer in the mid-1900s. American Flyer trains were more realistic than Lionel in several ways, but they were eventually eclipsed by smaller scales like HO and N (which we don't list here, because they're not "big" by model train standards). Today, the molds are owned by Lionel. They occasionally introduce new products or reintroduce old ones, always in small batches. Often the prices show that they are chiefly targeted to collectors. AF trains look great around a Christmas tree or on a train table. They also look good with Christmas Village structures, since most of them are close to S scale, but the track takes up a lot of room, so they won't fit on, say, your dining room table.
The following chart rates the relative usefullness of these classes of trains for various applications.
| Train Scale or Gauge |
Christmas Tree |
Christmas Villages |
Christmas Display Railroad |
Indoor Model Railroad |
Outdoor (Garden) Railroad |
Average Availability |
| O Gauge/ O27 |
***** |
**** |
***** |
***** |
** |
***** |
| Garden Trains/ Large Scale/G Gauge/ LGB |
***** |
** |
*** |
***** |
***** |
***** |
| On30 Trains |
** |
***** |
** |
***** |
* |
*** |
| S Gauge/ American Flyer |
***** |
**** |
**** |
***** |
* |
** |
Updates for 2020: - Model train manufacturing is cyclic. Every spring, major manufacturers bring prototypes to national and international toy shows. There they take orders from the major wholesalers and add some percentage to sell through other channels. So the trains that hit the market in September were ordered months ago, which us is one reason there are so many Lionel sets available, for example.
Distributors might not be so optimistic next year, but in the meantime, if your family gong to be spending more time at home than usual, what's wrong with having products that have real play value?
We now return you to our regularly-scheduled programming. :-)
About the Towns
Buildings and accessories to go with O gauge trains have been made for over a century, made by Lionel and by many other manufacturers. But starting in 1976 a new kind of model town emerged - the collectible ceramic and resin holiday villages made by Hawthorne Village, Lemax, Department 56, and many other suppliers. It wasn't long before people who were collecting holiday village pieces began getting their Lionel trains out of the attic to service the little ceramic communities. 
And the trains looked pretty good with the towns.
Still, most of the holiday villages looked very old fashioned compared to the trains, so the Bachmann company introduced some On30 trains that were especially designed to go with the villages. By the mid-1990s, the "trains-and-towns" evolution came full circle, when Hawthorne Village(r) began making special collectible On30 trains to go with their collectible village pieces.
About Our Buyer's Guides
When choosing from the many products and suppliers available, we attempt to recommend products that:
- Are reliable and well-made,
- Are available from reliable suppliers with a good record of customer service, and
- Have received good customer feedback.
- If possible, we also try to recommend products that are available from multiple suppliers, to give you a better chance of getting the train you want, although this isn't always possible.
We also provide you with more than just "a train in a box."
Our buyers guides provide links to beginner-friendly articles that help you make the best decisions at each stage of your involvement in the hobby. In fact this whole site got started because readers who found our Primer articles invaluable kept contacting us to say they were having trouble finding some product we discussed.
If you already have a train set and wonder where to go from there, the Big Indoor Trains(tm) primer articles should give you the information you need. If they don't answer your question, contact me and I'll help you if I can. (In fact, that's how most of our articles get started.)
Note about Suppliers: While we try to help you get the products you want by recommending suppliers with a good record of customer service, all transactions between you and the supplier you chose to provide your trains or other purchases are governed by the published policies on the supplier's web site. So please print off any order confirmation screens and save copies of invoices, etc., so you can contact the appropriate supplier should any problems occur. (They almost never do, but you want to be on the safe side.)
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