Gaugemaster’s OO gauge figures arrive, adding life to rail scenes

A six-figure pack lets an OO modeller fill a footplate scene in one hit, while the three-figure sets keep the same realism within reach for a smaller station corner, shed road or depot cameo. That split is the point of Gaugemaster’s new figure range, which has now reached stock and is being pitched as a layout-finishing detail rather than a simple accessory.

The first release, called On the Footplate, is aimed squarely at rail-served scenes. OO gauge remains the main model railway scale in the United Kingdom, running 4mm:1ft on 16.5mm gauge track, and this range is built to sit naturally on that kind of layout, whether the scene is a platform, a street frontage, a depot or a scenic diorama. These are figures designed exclusively for Gaugemaster’s line, so the company is clearly treating them as a core realism upgrade for its own ecosystem rather than a loose add-on.

GM950 is the full six-piece pack, and it reads like a ready-made operating tableau: a wheel tapper, a right-sided driver, a left-sided driver, a fireman standing, a fireman shovelling and a locomotive maintenance crew member. That mix makes the pack especially useful around an engine in service or under attention, where a single locomotive can suddenly look busy, supervised and lived-in. At £12.95, the pack works out at just over £2.15 per figure, which is the kind of value that suits a layout builder trying to add density without buying more people than a scene can realistically hold.

The smaller packs, GM970 and GM971, each contain three painted 1:76 scale figures and are priced at £6.95 apiece. They cut the same theme into smaller bites, letting buyers pick up just the operating crew or just the maintenance side, instead of committing to the whole six-figure spread. That makes them a better fit for compact layouts, for modellers who are building one carefully framed scene at a time, or for anyone who wants to test how much human activity a platform or depot can take before it starts to feel crowded.

Gaugemaster first announced the range on November 21, 2025, alongside further themed packs such as Manual Workers, At the Station and Town Folk. The company says the masters were traditionally sculpted from archive material for maximum authenticity and that the figures are delicately hand painted. It also says it probably offers the largest selection of OO gauge model figures in the world, which is exactly the sort of claim that only matters if the figures can do what these now do: make a technically complete layout feel properly inhabited.