  Our goal was to compare the open cluster photometric distance scale of the
global survey of star clusters in the Milky Way (MWSC) with the distances
derived from trigonometric parallaxes from the Gaia DR1/TGAS catalogue and to
investigate to which degree and extent both scales agree. We compared the
parallax-based and photometry-based distances of 5743 cluster stars selected as
members of 1118 clusters based on their kinematic and photometric MWSC
membership probabilities. We found good overall agreement between trigonometric
and photometric distances of open cluster stars. The residuals between them
were small and unbiased up to $\log (d,[pc]) \approx 2.8$. If we considered
only the most populated clusters and used cluster distances obtained from the
mean trigonometric parallax of their MWSC members, the good agreement of the
distance scales continued up to $\log (d,[pc]) \approx 3.3$.
