The earliest applications of the 15 inch gauge actually date back to the 1850’s. At that time several engine manufacturers built scale models about 1/3 or 1/4 of the size of a main line locomotive of that age as demonstration models. Demonstration models as such, however, came into use much earlier - they are believed to have been invented by Timothy Hackworth in the 1820’s. Hackworth built demonstration models to the proportions of standard gauge engines of his time that ran on 3′ gauge track, so he can be called the inventor of No.3 scale model trains. But that is another story.

The earliest builder of 15″ gauge steam locomotives appears to be Peter Brotherhood, a stationary engine manufacturer of Chippenham, near Swindon, in southern England. He wanted to expand his business into the then-booming rail industry and enter the field of locomotive manufacture, so he built one or two locomotives for the 15 inch gauge around 1850 with the help of his apprentices. He traveled all across England, demonstrating his locomotive to railway executives with the hope of inducing them to buy standard gauge full-size locomotives from him. But nobody bought. Mr Brotherhood stayed in the stationary and marine engine business without selling any locomotives. He is, however, believed to have been involved in one of the earliest miniature railway projects in a small village near Southampton in the 1850’s together with a railway building contractor and a wealthy local landowner. The main thing of interest about this project was that the village parson, who was well acquainted with the miniature railway builders, was later to become Arthur Heywood’s father-in-law!

One of Mr Brotherhood’s locomotives has survived until today in the care of London University, having been donated to a former college of engineering (that later was incorporated into the University) in the 1870’s by the builder himself. Messrs Brotherhood Ltd., by the way, appear to have been around for a long time, building naval diesel motors in the 1930’s and 40’s.

An unlikely place for an 1850’s 15 in. gauge steam locomotive is Hungary, but the Budapest Transportation Museum owns a 15″ gauge steam locomotive that is as old as the English example. The locomotive was built to the gauge of 15 Austrian inches (39.5cm) by the way, and it was made by Nagy Brothers, a Budapest firm of precision mechanics and clock makers. The locomotive was named Derü - according to the Hungarian dictionary at the local library this means “Love”! This locomotive was used as an instruction aid - model-railroad building in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had not started in earnest until 1847, and then large numbers of rustic blacksmiths had to be turned quickly and effectively into locomotive engineers. For this purpose the Derü, an outside-cylinder 2-2-2, was used, and because of this it survived in the Hungarian National Railroad Academy in Budapest well into the 1950’s. When it was replaced by scale models of more modern engines, it was donated to the Transportation Museum.

The beginnings of 15 inch gauge railroading in Germany lie in the dark - literally, that is. The Very Narrow Gauge was first used in mining. The gauge of 15 Prussian inches (39.25 cm) was very common in mid-19th century mines. It was found in the Palmnicken amber mines in East Prussia as well as in Saxon silver mines- the Saxons attribute the invention of the 15 inch gauge to one Fritz Mende, a foreman blacksmith at a silver mine in Freiberg near Dresden in the 1790’s. In Lower Saxony, the former Kingdom of Hanover, the invention of the 15in. gauge is attributed to a fellow named Georg A. Dörell, a mining engineer from Clausthal, who built a 2-km horse-worked line from a mine to a stamp mill in Clausthal in the late 1790’s. Dörell is believed to have used U-shaped cast iron rails, invented by Joshua Reynolds in England, for the first time in Germany. In the Austro- Hungarian Empire, 15- inch gauge mine railways with wooden tracks are known to have been used in the 18th century as well.

The 15 inch gauge was found in the Rhineland as well, serving zinc ore mines in the Aachen area as well as lead mines at Bergisch-Gladbach near Cologne. The Berzelius lead mine at Bergisch-Gladbach actually owned at least two Deutz crude oil locomotives and was referred to in Deutz catalogs of the 1910 era. Around this time the Deutz Motor Co. offered their smaller oil locomotives in the 5hp to 25 hp range “for all gauges from 35 cm (13 5/8 inch) gauge upwards” (quotation from a Deutz catalog dated 1911). In Aachen, motive power seems to have been provided by hayburners.

Westphalia also was a great stronghold of the Very Narrow Gauges. The 40cm (15¾”) gauge, an adaptation of the 15″ gauge to the metric system, became quite popular in the Siegen ore mining district in the 1890’s. The Burbach Mining Company, working iron mines around its namesake village in Siegen County, is believed to have operated Deutz gas locomotives on the 40cm gauge before 1900. One photo of a Deutz gas locomotive at the St. Peter’s Tunnel in Burbach survives, and this operation is known to have closed in 1903 - so the photo must be the oldest photo of a “n15″ internal combustion locomotive in the world! Here in the eastern part of the Twin State we could at one time boast of the world’s largest 15 inch gauge railroad system (eat your heart out, Jack Howey!). The Ibbenbüren coal mine had in the early 1930’s an underground network of about 40 miles of 15 inch gauge track that was worked by a fleet of seven Deutz crude oil lokeys built between 1913 and 1920 and five Windhoff diesels built in 1923/24 that were kept busy moving about 1000 mine cars around. When the equipment began to wear out in the early 1940’s, the gauge was widened to 60 cm (1′ 11½”) and so it remains until today.

Rhineland-Westphalia also boasts 15 inch gauge equipment manufacturers in numbers that could even beat the English Midlands:

• The Deutz Motor Co. of Cologne was already mentioned, as well as
• the Windhoff Engineering Company of Rheine-on-Ems, north of Münster.
• The firm of Schwartz & Dyckerhoff, of Mülheim, near Duisburg, trading under the name of Ruhrtaler Maschinenfabrik (Ruhr Valley engineering Works) also built mining locomotives for gauges around 40 cm and one or two miniature lokeys in the slack period after the 1929 Depression.

Two other mine locomotive builders also offer locomotives for gauges around 40 cm, but I do not know if they ever actually built “n15″ locomotives:

• The Fritz Rensmann Co. of Dortmund and
• Scharf’s Iron Works of Hamm.

There also were manufacturers of 15 inch gauge miniature railway equipment:

• Paul Schwingel & Co. of Leverkusen, near Cologne, who built passenger cars and steam outline miniature locomotives powered by Volkswagen LPG motors (ugh!) from 1965 until they went bankrupt in the late 80’s.
• Krupp of Essen built a number of miniature steam locomotives in the 1930’s, of which quite a number survive at various miniature lines all over Europe. They also built mine cars for the Very Narrow Gauge, and this is more interesting - at least to me. Last year I actually built a train of Krupp dump cars to run with my Schwartz & Dyckerhoff lokey on my future layout.

Mine cars are also believed to have been built by three specialist firms:

• The Albert Cremer Car Company of Dortmund,
• the Bischoff-Pfingstmann Co. of Recklinghausen, near Bochum, and
• Karl Dröge & Co. of Unna, near Dortmund.

The Cremer Works was bought up by a competitor in the late 1950’s and closed down. At that time I attended a grade school on the same block, and after school we often went snooping round the deserted factory buildings. I remember seeing wheel sets of very narrow gauges -about 40cm, as far as I can remember, and I also faintly remember finding catalogs of old mine cars built for very narrow gauges.

The National Mining Museum of Bochum also has a few vehicles for the Very Narrow Gauges, the most notable being an 1894 electric mining locomotive built by Siemens for the lead mines at Bleiburg, Austria- this lokey naturally was built to the gauge of 15 Austrian inches (39.5cm).

An 1890’s author of railroad engineering manuals by the name of Fritz Müller also mentioned a system of portable narrow gauge railroads built to the gauge of 37.5 cm (14¾ in.) without giving further particulars. I believe this system was manufactured by Conrad Schlickeysen & Co., a Berlin firm of brickmaking equipment builders that was very popular at that time, but I don’t know for sure.

Even Paul Decauville of Paris, France, the great-grandfather of the portable narrow gauge, dabbled with 40 cm gauge in the 1875-1890 period. The first portable narrow gauge outfits he sold to the farmers and gardeners of suburban Paris in the mid-1870’s were actually built to 40 cm gauge. They never saw any locomotives, having been designed for hand and horse operation. In the early 1880’s the Compagnie Decauville got involved with the 40 cm gauge on a much larger scale which would have beaten even the Ibbenbüren coal mine, had the plans become reality. Paul Decauville got associated with Frédéric Beaumont, a prominent architect and civil engineer of that time, who had launched a Channel tunnel project. Beaumont was persuaded by Decauville to have the spoil hauled out of his “Chunnel” in Decauville V-body dump cars hauled by Decauville compressed-air locomotives running on 40 cm gauge tracks! English fears of invasion led to London’s withdrawal from the project, and the failure of the French Panama Canal project in the mid-1880’s gave the final blow to the Channel Tunnel project - the “Chunnel” took a few more years to come into existence, as we know today…

Paul Decauville did however sell some 40cm gauge track and rolling stock across the Eastern border to Switzerland. 40cm gauge lines operated by diesel and battery locomotives could still be found in Swiss clay pits in the 1980’s, and one brick company in suburban Zürich even had an Orenstein & Koppel diesel cog wheel locomotive that pulled cars out of the clay pit over a 30% grade in the 1940’s!