Alan Durham
For me the two biggest things that attracted me to EM gauge are:
1) the wheels never look far enough apart in OO (which of course they aren’t), from the front end view it seems glaringly obvious to me that compared to the buffers the wheels look completely out of place.
2) I was never really satisfied with OO track. Proprietary in recent years has come along way and on the whole great products, however the sleepers never look right. They are either too small on proprietary track or look somehow odd when hand built at home.
I find that EM gauge is achievable with my modest skills and that perhaps P4 would be a step too far, that said I am always in admiration of those who have such skills and I appreciate the results. I realise that what I model may not be to everybody’s taste or exacting standards, but the most important things for me are that I enjoy what I am doing and being happy with what I achieve, even if I am unlikely to win any awards.
Finally a disclaimer of sorts – my comments above are not intended as any form of criticism or judgement, there are some excellent proprietary products available now and there are some wonderful “non-finescale” models as well as “finescale” or “non-finescale” with compromises, in all gauges. After all I am forever making compromises! My ethos is if you get joy from your hobby then enjoy it, whether it be an exacting model running to a timetable or a circle of track on the dining table.