Yes, I titled my blog post in direct evocation of THAT episode of Star Trek‘s original series, and yes, modelling in 30 inch narrow gauge can be about as frustarating as being buried under a pile of the adorable but prolific little furballs, due only to one singular problem: finding decent-running and moderately priced 9mm gauge steam locomotive mechanisms. Everything else is snap-together plastic kit difficulty compared to this huge chore.
All right, I haven’t been totally honest. I still have to find the superstructures for the locomotives, and though locomotive, passenger and freight car shells can be had off of Shapeways, they are rather few and far between, and as I said before, YOU STILL HAVE TO SOURCE YOUR OWN CHASSIS!
Concerning other sources, the one place to get any other HOn30 stock is http://www.parksidedundas.co.uk, under OO9. This is the British version of HOn30, and being OO scale, it is scaled 4mm to the foot as opposed to HO’s 3.5mm to the same measure.
This is no great problem when your locomotives are small, though with larger measures the disparity begins to rear its ugly head…
Oh well, I suppose I should be happy that there are in fact a few good-running N-gauge mechanisms available, and that they are in some instances reasonably priced
Until next time, John W. Cunningham