![]() On our Tehachapi line, the speed limit on the hill is 25 mph, and our uphill (eastbound) trains rarely make over 15 mph. Now, obviously you can't do this in your head (at least I can't!), so you whip out your trusty calculator and do it ahead of time for your favorite engines. To get miles per hour, multiply by 0.682 (which is 3600 seconds per hour divided by 5280 feet per mile), and you get 24 mph. ![]() Since an SD45 is about 69 feet long (68' 10', according to my reference), that means it is travelling at 34.5 feet per second. Say it takes 2 seconds for an SD45 to go by a fixed point. An easier way if you're viewing the railroad from outside the train is to count seconds as your engine moves past a fixed point, say a signal pole, and convert that into feet per second. ![]() That's all fine if you're sitting in the cab of your engine, but I'm 87x HO scale, so I don't fit. This is what the real railroads used to do, I understand, before the advent of accurate speedometers. You time the train between one milepost and the next, and the table converts the time into mph. At the La Mesa Model Railroad Club in the San Diego Model Railroad Museum, where I run trains from time to time, there are speed tables at each control station.
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