My club did some testing and promo work which makes a scale speedometer that you hide in a box car and it connects to your apple device. It was neat. No u prototypical speed gates on the layout.
Speedbee-products.com I don't know how their kickstarter did. So I don't know status. HO first, n to follow. The circuit will fit fine in n
Western reserve division NMRA mid cental division 5, has a auto compute program to find scale speed. Measure a distance (1 foot-3 foot) and enter the time it took and it will instantly give you scale speed for any scale. I have set my loco CVs to these settings so the Digitrax throttle readout is the actual scale speed of the locomotive, and its max is set to the max speed for the line. (50mph)
never thought about "scale" speeds, but why run and stop so fast you would be dead if this was real. now on b,a,r,t they drop you on the floor if you are not holding onto something. (computer controlled). amtrack you have to look out the window to know you have even moved. (human controlled). .
Max. authorized speed on the real LAJ Ry is 10 MPH. And that's what it will be on my LAJ layout, i.e no zoom zoom switching "contests"!
For me it depends on the train. Switching is done slowly, but my fast passenger trains are streaks. I don't care if it's not scale speed either, I just want it too look like the real thing so added speed gives it that 1st class passenger effect. Besides if we were really scaling things down, then time would scale as well. Speaking of which a lot of modelers do use scale time clocks to run their layouts.
An example of why I do not run scale speed. It has to feel like it's running at these speeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5MfzmugtRw
I always try to run at a reasonably scale speed. I have no way of really measuring the speed. The two links below are cab and caboose rides around my layout. Seems reasonable to me.
We had a speedometer at the club yesterday. I was clocked at 37 mph. (50 kph or so) Most others were faster.
I tend to be the slow runner but have no idea what the scale speed is. A friend of mine has a way of measuring the distance traveled in so many seconds and with a little computing we get some idea how slow or fast we are running. Works pretty good. If I can find the chart I will attempt to share it with you.
I get a rough ballpark speed by seeing how fast 40' boxcars pass. 88 feet per second is 60 mph, so a boxcar every second is almost 30 mph.
