How fast or slow do you run your trains. Sometimes I like to see my switchers crawl, while other times I like to see my freights go fast. I know how to do the math to figure out scale speed, I am an engineer, but I was wondering how other folks run their trains and if anyone bothers to actually measure the scale speed of their trains?
Depends on if there are people here and how many adult beverages I have had. Most of the time it is around 40 sMPH. Takes about 1.5 minutes to make it around the A and B line.
Cuda Ken
I hate Rust
Hi,
I typically run my HO trains in the following speeds: very slow, slow, medium, fast, very fast, and full speed ahead!
Seriously, most of the time I play "real RR" and run them at what appears to be prototypical speeds. I especially like to watch/hear the slack run out (or in) of a long freight.
Buttttt, every once in awhile I like to crank it open and give my wheelsets/couplers/track a real test. Ha, today's HO locos (the ones I have anyway) will handle 26 inch plus curves full speed without flying off. In my early days ('60s) in HO, those Athearn rubber band drives would get airborne pretty easily.
Mobilman44
ENJOY !
Living in southeast Texas, formerly modeling the "postwar" Santa Fe and Illinois Central
I run my freights anywhere from 15 smph to 50 smph. Passenger trains run between 40 and 80 mph.
I run mine just fast enough so the caboose doesn't catch the locomotive.
Actually my layout is not big enough for top speeds and it is meant to be a lazy branch line where no speed records were set anyway. My branchline steam trains run at about 2 revs of the driving wheels per second tops, and the switchers run as slow as I can get them to.
I also bought a pushbike speedometer which I plan to fit into an old boxcar. Evidently you can use it with a magnet on an axle and set the wheel diameter to 33" and it will read scale speed.
cheers
Alan Jones in Sunny Queensland (Oz)
All speeds, depending on locomotive and use (and how close the track gets to the edge of the layout).
HanselHow fast or slow do you run your trains. ... I was wondering how other folks run their trains and if anyone bothers to actually measure the scale speed of their trains?
There is a rule of 10 mph in the yards , and all I have is a yard , so its all slow running
Can't go past the yard limits .
I have a mountainous HO railroad with up to 2.4% grades and relatively generous (34-36") curves, so I pretty much 'eyeball' how fast my trains are running. Generally between 30 and 40 smph for expidited freights and reefer 'extras', somewhat slower for local and 'drag' freights. I usually run my through passengers (only one stop at Deer Creek) about 40-50 smph, and my little local passenger (all stops including fishing holes) about 30 or so.
As I said, I'm only calculating with my eyeball, not math. As long as they look like they're really 'pulling' against the grade, I'm happy.
Tom
Tom View my layout photos! http://s299.photobucket.com/albums/mm310/TWhite-014/Rio%20Grande%20Yuba%20River%20Sub One can NEVER have too many Articulateds!
Phil, I'm not a rocket scientist; they are my students.
Only at posted speed limits...
https://tstage9.wixsite.com/nyc-modeling
Time...It marches on...without ever turning around to see if anyone is even keeping in step.
I like crawling switchers. You need good running engines and track without dead spots, frogs. I've limited the top speed with the decoder.
At the branchline I run also slowly. This way the distance seems longer.
And this is a unit train at grade.
Wolfgang
Pueblo & Salt Lake RR
Come to us http://www.westportterminal.de my videos my blog
When I had the need for speed I would take my slot cars to the commerical track and enter the weekly races.
Trains are not slot cars.
I run mine at scale speeds.
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
wedudler I like crawling switchers. You need good running engines and track without dead spots, frogs. I've limited the top speed with the decoder. At the branchline I run also slowly. This way the distance seems longer. And this is a unit train at grade. Wolfgang
Very nice switcher. Do you have the sound eminating from that little thing? Who makes the person doing the driving looking out the window?
Thanks for all of your responses.
It seems that most of you run your trains at scale speeds. Next 2 questions;
1. How do you know you are running at these speeds? Measuring them? Or eyeballing them? I have seen on MR a scale speedometer you can make or purchase.
2. How does the trains speed relate to the Fast Clock?
Hansel
How do I know I am running at scale speeds? Check my website www.xdford.digitalzones.com and the "about scale speed" rather than rewrite it here...
Hope this helps
Regards
Trevor
If a loco won't crawl along slowly without any hesitation or jerkiness it is imho not worth owning. We have a speedo hooked up to the mainline on the club & I usually clock about 44 mph.Speed limit on this stretch of track is 50 mph. The SD50's pulling 48 RD4 coal hoppers look great at this speed. Seems most operaters run too fast to Me, but They're running They're train & I run Mine the way I want. The main thing is to have fun, that's what it's supposed to be about anyway, right ? R
I generally run pretty slow, roughly half-speed. I right now just have a switching layout, but on my previous layout I ran passenger trains at 30-35 scale MPH, general freights at maybe 20 MPH, and ore trains basically as slow as possible, maybe 12-15 MPH. Part of the reason is I think it looks better, and it makes the layout seem longer since it takes longer to travel a set distance than it would if I were running at prototype speed. It may partly be a generational thing, when I started in the hobby it was hard to get an engine that would run slowly enough to run at real speeds, so the emphasis was on how to get your engines to go slowly, and a good running engine that would crawl along was kind of a status symbol.
Hansel 1. How do you know you are running at these speeds? Measuring them? Or eyeballing them? I have seen on MR a scale speedometer you can make or purchase.
Several of my BLI engines with QSI sound have the "talk back" feature where you press a function button and it tells you the speed. Even I was a little surprised the other day when I was switching and my NW2 said it was only cruising along at 6 sMPH!!
Otherwise, you can measure how long it takes the train to go a set distance and convert it to scale MPH. My last layout's mainline loop just happened to be right about 1 scale kilometer so it was pretty easy to calculate scale KPH and convert to MPH.
If a train takes 60 seconds to go one scale mile it's going 60 MPH; if it takes 120 seconds it's going 30 MPH, etc. You can do the same type of calculation by setting a short distance like a yard or 10 feet, but the longer the distance you measure, the more accurate it will be.
Hansel 2. How does the trains speed relate to the Fast Clock?
Strictly speaking I don't think it does. The time it takes to go a scale mile isn't really affected by a Fast Clock. The fast clock just sort of creates an illusion that points A and B are farther apart than they really are, because it takes say 12 fast minutes to get from A to B instead of the 2 minutes it actually takes (if you're using a 6 to 1 fast clock ratio).
wjstixSeveral of my BLI engines with QSI sound have the "talk back" feature where you press a function button and it tells you the speed.
Same here. I think any engine that uses QSI sound is capable of letting you know the speed using an audible talk back feature.
Hmmmmmm.....I hear voices from my choo choo's.......
I often say, as do others, to run at scale speed, but on the compressed space of a layout, scale speed is often too fast for me. I try to keep my modern-era trains running at no more that a scale 50 MPH on the mainline and about 20 MPH on auxillary tracks. Yard/industrian switchers run about 10 MPH max.
Ron
Owner and superintendant of the N scale Texas Colorado & Western Railway, a protolanced representaion of the BNSF from Fort Worth, TX through Wichita Falls TX and into Colorado.
Check out the TC&WRy on at https://www.facebook.com/TCWRy
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I model with high benchwork which enables me to view my trains from a heighth roughly equal to the heighth I would view prototype trains. When watching a train pass between two buildings as an instance I will crank up the throttle until the speed looks about right and I leave it at that. Periodically I will time things with a stopwatch. Awhile back I timed a 50' car past a given point and discovered that that particular train was moving at between 47.5 and 48 (scale) miles per hour which is just about what I want for my manifest freights so this observation-at-trackside proceedure works for me.
One of the electronic symposiums in one of the hobby magazines once ran an article on building a speed-trap using, I believe. electric eye technology. Sometime later someone updated this with laser technology. They were really not that expensive but, as is true with most of my manaña projects I never got around to building one.
From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet
Driline wjstixSeveral of my BLI engines with QSI sound have the "talk back" feature where you press a function button and it tells you the speed. Same here. I think any engine that uses QSI sound is capable of letting you know the speed using an audible talk back feature. Hmmmmmm.....I hear voices from my choo choo's.......
It is pretty neat. My early BLI engines with the QSI sound didn't have the speed talk-back but it was one of the things added with the chip-replacement upgrades. Right now the only one I haven't upgraded is my NYC Hudson, but since for the forseable future I'm going to have a switching layout I figure it can wait for a while...I can't really use a passenger engine, especially one with no front coupler!!
I run them them fairly slow because alot of my curves are sharp...my track work isn't that great...my rolling stock is not that cheap..and my basement has a hard cement floor.
I run them pretty slow. Even with my upgraded trackwork, I haven't ironed out all the bugs yet, so derailments do occasionally happen. Since my track is only about half done, my trains run backwards a lot, with two engines pushing 10 cars or so. Derailments even at low speed backwards tend to dump cars on their side and create a massive pile-up before I get a chance to sprint to a throttle port, plug in the throttle, and stop the train. I don't even want to think about what would happen at a higher speed...
I would guess that the fastest I run them on the fastest straightest track is about 45 SMPH.
Your train got smaller the second time around. Being a MILW fan I will say you could have just fixed that hopper so it didn't shake instead of take it off the consist. 19 cars is kind of a short unit isn't it? I still liked the video no matter what I say.
Hi all,
There's a nifty speed calculator here
http://www.mcr5.org/NMRA/articals/speed.htm
You can also get a rough idea with this method for HO scale.
Place markers beside the track at one inch intervals, as the train passes the first mark, start counting 5 seconds. The number of inches the train passes in 5 seconds is roughly equal to scale miles per hour.
Here's the reason this works.
1 mile = 63360 inches
1 scale mile = 63360 / 87.1(HO scale) = 727inches
1 scale mile per hour = 727 inches per hour
convert this to inches per minute = 727/60 inches per minute = 12 inches/minute
then inches per second = 12/60 inches per second = 0.2inches per second
at 1 scale MPH you would travel 0.2inches per second
therefore in 5 seconds you would travel 5 X 0.2 inches = 1"
at 2 scale MPH you would travel twice this distance =2" in 5 secs etc
therefore number of inches travelled in 5 secs = SMPH
With a few optical sensors, and some electronics, you could set up a speed calculating zone.
You can work out other measures for different scales using the scale factor or even convert to kilometers per hour.
As for how to relate this to fast clocks, I don't think you can. If you used the above idea you would divide by 6 (or whatever fast clock factor) and get even slower speeds.
The fastest I've run any of my engines was my Athearn Challenger, at my home layout, which is 4x8... 22"radius curves, put it about halfway up the dial. It was near skiing, (In car terms, this is driving with only two wheels on the left/right side on the ground) so I didn't turn it up more. I'm guessing it was doing about 60-70 sMPH... I usually run trains around 30-50 sMPH, though.
I run at speeds that look normal, not ripping around and not ultra-macro slow where it's hard to detect motion and not at "scale speed" I believe there are many factors not being applied in scale speed, resulting in very slow trains indeed. The comment I have heard at every train show is how slow the trains are moving, I'm glad to see the above forum people just moving their trains at a comfortable, reasonable, and enjoyable speed.
MILW-RODReing a MILW fan I will say you could have just fixed that hopper so it didn't shake instead of take it off the consist.
All Milwaukee Road cars shake like that, even when they aren't running on home rails.
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."-Albert Einstein
http://gearedsteam.blogspot.com/
All these ideas sound great! I think I will measure a distance and then time it with a stopwatch and then make a mark on my transformer with some tape and repeat this process a few times to get a feel for the scale speeds. I only have a small switching layout, a paper mill, and run a Kato NW2. I even did some looking on Yahoo and found someone who took a bicycle speedometer and hooked it up to one of his cars.