Having an around the wall layout I enjoy walking along with my trains. It's about a 200' loop plus maneuvering around peninsulas. My normal walking speed is right around 3 actual miles per hour. I walk 1 mile in 20 minutes.
At what scale speed is my train traveling when staying along beside me if I maintain 3 human MPH?
Thank you.
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Multiply human speed by the inverse of the scale of the trains. For example, 1/48 trains would be running 3 x 48 or 144 scale mph.
Warp speed! 
Gee Tom a fun question. Looking at it the other way - 3mph is 5280 x 3 = 15840 feet per hour which implies a walking rate of 4.4 feet per second. Or if you were walking the center of the track you would make about 80 complete loops of your layout an hour. I would have gotten dizzy long before the hour was up going in circles and decided to have a refreshing adult beverage to consider my dilemma. Walking ballasted track in the back country is not the most pleasant think to do - those rocks can be uncomfortable. Enjoy your walk!
Bob, Wow! It sure does not look that fast. Running conventional at part throttle it seems like a reasonable speed. Going to have to reconsider my running speeds.
I am seeing the drivers lazily turning and the drive rods just seem to be lifting and lowering with a reciprocating ease. Not the blur of my 1:1 train videos.
Scouting Dad, Actually 80 laps around the basement in one hour is a reasonable exercise. It is the one thing helping to keep my covid physic in check. It's just the dang peninsulas that make an obstacle course out of it.
Assuming a scale mile is 110 feet. Knowing how long it takes your train to cover that distance should make it easy to calculate mph
If you do not have 110' of track, you can use this chart from Lionel's website from 2013.
Mark off three feet of track and time the train over that distance. The chart is in seconds.
Not as accurate as over a 110' distance. Forum member Dennis did this for a 11 foot distance.
| SCALE SPEED TABLE | ||
| Time to Travel | O Gauge | |
| 11 Feet | SCALE | |
| (in seconds) | MPH | |
| 4 | 90.0 | |
| 4.5 | 80.0 | |
| 5 | 72.0 | |
| 5.5 | 65.5 | |
| 6 | 60.0 | |
| 6.5 | 55.4 | |
| 7 | 51.4 | |
| 7.5 | 48.0 | |
| 8 | 45.0 | |
| 8.5 | 42.4 | |
| 9 | 40.0 | |
| 9.5 | 37.9 | |
| 10 | 36.0 | |
| 11 | 32.7 | |
| 12 | 30.0 | |
| 13 | 27.7 | |
| 14 | 25.7 | |
| 15 | 24.0 | |
| 16 | 22.5 | |
| 17 | 21.2 | |
| 18 | 20.0 | |
| 19 | 18.9 | |
| 20 | 18.0 | |
| 21 | 17.1 | |
| 22 | 16.4 | |
| 23 | 15.7 | |
| 24 | 15.0 | |
| 25 | 14.4 | |
| 26 | 13.8 | |
| 27 | 13.3 | |
| 28 | 12.9 | |
| 29 | 12.4 | |
| 30 | 12.0 | |
| 35 | 10.3 | |
| 40 | 9.0 | |
| 45 | 8.0 | |
| 50 | 7.2 | |
| 55 | 6.5 | |
| 60 | 6.0 | |
Neat charts, thank you Terry, John and CAPpilot for that great reference we all can use. Apparently I run my through trains at 60 MPH.
This probably makes many of my freight trains too fast and my passenger trains possibly too slow on the average.
It does give me a base line for adjusting my walking pace for in town and in the country travel.
Is it customary for RRs to have speed limits when running through towns or within yard limits while staying on the mainline?
Lower speed limits for taking a divergent turnout route in a crossover? Further adjusted if the turnout is a #20 or #26 or what ever? Of course mine are only a #6 or #8.
Thanks for your thoughts.
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