Don't forget the type of train also. Unit coal trains around here are 40mph tops. The coal, mostly destined for power plants, is pulverized so it is prone to being blown all over the place at high speeds. I imagine any train containing open top wood chip cars would have a similar speed restriction.
Right on Inkaneer. The WM tried to always place wood chip hoppers ahead of coal hoppers to avoid coal dust blowing back into the chips and causing trouble at pulp mills.
Cool thread. Thanks for the calculator link. I hadn’t seen that one before. I just measured my latest LifeLike SW9 tuneup with an ESU Lokpilot Nano installed. 2:19.28 minutes over 36” according to the calculator is 2.35 smph in N scale.
I guess timing the distance traveled doesn't make use of a FastClock. 2.18 seconds to travel 1 foot is 50MPH at 160 scale. But if you are using a 4x fast clock that would only be 1/2 real second for 1 foot.
Fast clocks are not intended to allow higher model train speeds, just more realistic looking time table entries. As an aside on the engineering aspects of scaling, consider what the movie makers have to contend with when using models to represent real trains in movie scenes. The big issue is that gravity does not scale down with size. So, a 1:1 train falls off a trestle with a downward acceleration of 32.2 feet per second per second. But, that comes out to 32.2 x [scale factor] scale feet per second per second. That makes a movie shot at regular speed look like gravity is much stronger - say 160 Gs for N scale. The solution for movies was to run the model train at the actual real speed, so that its momentum and real gravity made the model follow the same parabolic arc shape as a real train going off a trestle at that speed, but film it at a film speed that was speeded-up by the scale factor. Then, when they played the scene back at regular speed, it slowed both the train speed to a realistic looking speed over the tracks and the acceleration of gravity to 32.2 scale feet per second per second as the train falls into the ravine.
HO scale here; on my mountainous layout with curves and cliffs; it is speed-restricted to 18-20 mph like jpwisc does. Here is a short video of a F unit at 18 mph on my layout which I think "looks right": And slow speeds do make the layout seem larger, too!
