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Test ran my first locomotive - kind of a bummer.
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[quote]QUOTE: <i>Originally posted by KKEIFE</i> <br /><br />I have spent the last two years preparing a train room, building the benchwork, developing a track plan, laying the roadbed and finally completing the track work and wiring on the outer mainline loop on my 7.5' x 11' HO scale layout last night. <br /> <br />I turned on the Digitrax Zephyr and put my first bought loco (P2K GP7) on it and ran it in analog mode. Things seemsed fine when I heard the whine of the engine but when I turn the throttle knob up the loco ran like it was in slow motion. I had the knob tuned up to full power and the engine slowly moved around about 35 feet of track. It seemed to pick up a liitle speed after a while but even my wife thought it was too slow. <br /> <br />I bright boyed the top and inner parts of the rail and it did not help. I have an outer loop that is about 35-40 feet of track that has 7 sets of 22 AWG feeder wires coming off a 14 AWG bus. I bought the loco off E-Bay. It is brand new (the seller had sold a lot of model RR stuff and had almost a 100% postiive feedback rating). I don't expect the speed to improve when I install the decoder tonight (at least thats what the Digitrax manual says). <br /> <br />Now it's been probably 40 some years since I was at the controls of a model RR and that was a Lionel O guage train. Are these HO engines really suppose to crawl along pretty slowly. If not, does anyone have any ideas on what I should try to do to increase the speed. <br />[/quote] <br /> <br />It's a common observation that running a DC train on 00 on the DCC system tends to result in slow speeds. But, you can also be a little more analytical about it and see just how slow. <br /> <br />The truth is it could also be partly perception. If I compare my 30-years-ago origins in the hobby (A Tyco box set), 'real' speeds would seem slow by comparison: <br /> <br />If I recall correctly, for HO 1ft/minute = 1 scale MPH. So 60FPM = 60 MPH, or 1 foot/second. 30 FPM - 30 MPH or 1 foot/2seconds. That's gives you a ballpark to mark off a few feet of track, and 'time' the loco and see if you're at reasonable speeds. <br /> <br />Actually, I did recall correctly, here's the link with handy conversion chart: http://www.gatewaynmra.org/designops.htm <br /> <br />It <i>can</i> seem slow... I have a 120ft. mainline, which at 60 scale MPH takes the train two full minutes to run. At 30 MPH, four minutes. Consider that, at 5 Scale MPH - a typical switching speed, it takes a loco 12 seconds to go one foot of distance!
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