Wal mart has a “hot wheels” speed gun for a 20 dollar bill. It can report speed in 1:1 or "Hot wheel " 1:64. It does track trains and reports the speed. It is interesting to note that if the 1:64 is selected, and that reading cut in half, one gets a rough 1:32 speed of the train. I clocked a GP-30 with a string of eignt on 3% grades running full open at 97 MPH. It took a while to coordinate the speeds to an acceptable level. The speed results can be adjusted for any scale with a little math.

Something new to enhance operations.

Jon Lindgren
Los Gatos Locos Railway

Interesting. I wonder how easy the circuit would be to hack for other scales. I may have to take a trip to Wallyworld and look for one to fiddle with.

It probably has a calculation programmed into a chip. Wouldn’t be very modifiable, I’d think.

Just take the 1:1 speed and multiply by your chosen scale.

Later,

K

Kevin Strong said:
Just take the 1:1 speed and multiply by your chosen scale.

Later,

K

So if the gun reads 1 mph, my train is going 20.3? I guess that makes sense, doesn’t it… given that time is generally taken as constant. I wonder how accurate the gun is in 1:1 at speeds below 5 mph … most police ones are not.

I have a “speed scaler” … basically a modified bicycle speedometer on an Aristo truck that can be towed behind a train. Since the value given for speed is based on a known wheel size, there are multipliers that can be input for any scale you’d like. It was particularly interesting to scale a train’s speed in 1:29 and then set the speed scaler to 1:20.3 and see the difference (assuming the train was being run at the same speed…) in what the same speed was. Also useful for demonstrating how fast a Shay should (or shouldn’t) be run…

Matthew (OV)