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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

I keep eyeballing the railroad track but that feels like HO and not O guage.

The track spacing doesn’t look right for O, also in 1961 im not sure two rail O gauge would be common... O usually has a third rail.

Could also be OO gauge, but that is rare in the US.

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OO is just a slightly bigger scale (1:76) at H0 track. Since UK loading diameter is slightly narrower than on other standard gauge railways (which is the reason for there being OO at all, as H0 motors wouldn't fit models of UK locomotives), there wouldn't be much of a noticeable difference. To me, this looks bigger than H0, but there are other scales and gauges, as well. Admittedly, my knowledge about these is pretty limited.

Definitely not O, HO stands for 'half O', and OO is/was pretty rare outside of the UK, I'd bet on HO.

Yes, not OO. There were probably no such US coaches available in OO.

And O would be way larger:

http://wgh.trains.com/-/media/Images/How%20To/Articles/ABCs%...

There is also S scale between HO and O, which I believe was still popular at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_scale

It's definitely an American HO scale layout. The track looks like Atlas and I recognize several of the buildings as HO-scale Revell kits that were popular at the time.

If that's the model railroad from the MIT ain't it a completely custom railroad, unique to the MIT? So it could even be none of those?

"Model railroad" would suggest a [scale] model of some extent railway, otherwise isn't it just railway/railroad without the "model" designation. If it's not modelled on something isn't it properly a toy or miniature railway. /pedantry

Here is a Wired article (2014) on the TMRC with photos of the actual layout: https://www.wired.com/2014/11/the-tech-model-railroad-club/

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