Well Rangust, I inherited all of Verne Niner's ATSF documentation and most of his rolling stock and motive power when he decided to to switch to ON30. I just not have had a lot of time to go through most of it yet. I was looking mostly for creating a quick lookup sheet as I was programming and speed matching my locomotive inventory. Thanks for the links, they help with the research too! I am getting ready to move the last of all my ATSF inventory to my ranch to run on the layout there. It is a combination of the Third and Fourth District.
Well, what you didn't get from Verne I probably did. N scale Norm and Sue are at Flagstaff at their retirement home, where he can see the main line from the porch. I got a lot of the Hays loads, and the entire load of wood telephone poles and parts (unbelievable how he could paint individual insulators), some cars. Verne was a great modeler and one of the few that I wholeheartedly accepted his work on as generally superior to my own and I learned a lot from him. I did get to visit him when I was in Arizona. We were doing the same area in N, he in 1948 and me in 1972. Hppefully you also got his photo DVD of the N layout when he was selling those.
I did not get the DVD, but I am also very familiar with Flagstaff having lived and worked there. And as a native Arizonan, I have been all over the state and know the terrain well. What I missed out on was the telephone poles as you said, but I did get a lot of the books and most of the rolling stock and locomotives, including the the ones he meticulously detailed as well. I really do miss him, we always got together when I was in Phoenix and while he taught me some modelling tips, I was able to teach him about DCC. Oh and we had this Mexican place we always went to as well, and I miss that too! He was not just a great modeler, he was also one of the nicest people I have ever met!
Scale MPH will only work if there is no compression on your layout. For example, a train moving at 69MPH will travel 69 miles in an hour. Even the SDSoNS, with 13 miles of track, represents a much larger railroad. Operationally, it’s better to know the actual distance, then scale down. If your division is 100 miles but you model 5 miles, actual train speed will be WAY slow. This is why combining road ops and yard ops never works.
I have a very large layout with almost no compression. That is why I want to run at prototype speeds.
As to actual train speeds in the day, when I was 13 yrs old (1959) I rode the Great Northern from Chicago to Spokane, WA by myself. It was a trip of a lifetime that started in Alexandria, VA. While on the Great Northern, I spent a great deal of time in the vista dome car and at the front of the dome, they had a clock-like speedometer that showed the train to be going 85 miles per hour across most of Montana. It could have done that speed in other places too, but I believe Montana is where I discovered the speedometer.
If you are talking a 'fastclock'...I dont use one. I run my trains at 'track speed'...which on my layout is 45-50 smph due to elevation changes and curves.. I run one train on a main. That leaves the other clear for switching the yard. It takes about 4 minutes for the train on the main to make one trip around the layout. My mains split the yards. I have a 'West Yard' and an 'East yard' They are independent of each other. If a train comes into the West Yard and the switcher is breaking it up...the loco goes to the fuel island. It MAY go to the turntable to be turned around. It then goes back in the yard and takes another consist out. All this being done while the train on the main is going round and round. I may even send the S2 out to switch the Concrete Company and/or the Scrap Yard. It may be a simple operation as I am usually the only one out there running trains...but I still can get it done. If THE Wife is out there running her excursion train I have to watch for her train...as it runs faster then my freights do...and I dont want to knock it over reaching across the main she is on when uncoupling my cars in the yard ! Its all a challenge...but where would the fun be if it wasnt !
