Wide gauge
Wide Gauge was an early model railway and toy train standard, introduced in the United States in 1906 by Lionel Corporation. As it was a toy standard, rather than a scale modeling standard, the actual scale of wide gauge locomotives and rolling stock varied. It ran on three-rail track that was 2 1/8 inches (nearly 54 mm) apart.Lionel dubbed its new standard Standard Gauge and trademarked the name. Lionel's Standard Gauge should not be confused with Standard Gauge for real railroads, or the later 1:64 scale S gauge popularized by American Flyer after World War II. Due to the trademark, Lionel's competitors mostly called their similar offerings Wide Gauge.
Historians disagree on Lionel's reason for creating Standard Gauge, giving two stories. One story is that Lionel misread the specifications for Märklin's Gauge 2, measuring the distance between the rails rather than between the centers of the rails, thus accidentally making a slightly larger and incompatible standard. The other story is that the change was a deliberate effort to lock out European competition by creating incompatible trains.
Whatever the reason for its initial creation, Lionel's Standard Gauge caught on at the expense of 1 Gauge. No fewer than four American competitors adopted Lionel's gauge: Ives in 1921, Boucher in 1922, Dorfan in 1924, and American Flyer in 1925. While all the manufacturers' track was the same size and the trains and buildings approximately the same scale, the couplers remained incompatible, making it impossible to mix train cars from different manufacturers without modification.
The increased number of manufacturers seemed to give legitimacy to Lionel's gauge, and because the boom of the 1920s made large toy trains affordable, Wide Gauge had its heyday in the mid-1920s only to virtually disappear during the Great Depression. Ives filed for bankruptcy in 1928 and its offerings were off the market by 1932. American Flyer discontinued its Wide Gauge trains in 1932. Dorfan went out of business in 1934. Lionel discontinued Standard gauge trains in 1940. Boucher, the last of the Standard/Wide gauge manufacturers, folded in 1943.
O gauge, which was smaller and less expensive to manufacture, thus became the most popular scale in the United States almost by default.
In recent years, Standard and Wide gauge equipment, mostly reproductions, has been produced by a number of smaller manufacturers, such as Williams Electric Trains, MTH Electric Trains, and McCoy Manufacturing, in small quantities aimed at the hobbyist market.