Dave, Art and all,
For those that have seen this before, I apologize for repeating.
I constantly ponder this same question. For the answer, I went to the big guys, 1:1, operating railroads. For actual speed, I use scale speed as to what I am running. The career railroaders of old always used time between line side polls and hardly relied on a speedometer, in our digital age that is different. Mainline trains, freights in this area, have a top speed of 55 mph. To me, close enough to a mile a minute. For ease of conversion, I break this down to 1:24 and measure that across a 12 ft bridge. Figuring my “look time” from bridge to watch is not perfect and certainly trying not to be that exact, I use 10 ft of the bridge, allowing for the one foot error at each end. So it comes out to speed at 1:24th scale travel time over the 10ft.
If the engine travels the distance in -
2 seconds = 82 mph
4 seconds = 41 mph
8 seconds = 21 mph
16 seconds = 10 mph
32 seconds = 5 mph
I get use to these speeds and then can carry them through out the railroad.
I try to run a tourist railroad, much like the EBT, Cass, Georgetown Loop, Cumbres and Toltec or the Durango and Silverton. 21 mph is certainly top end. So I try to not travel faster than 10 feet in 8 seconds. At a mainline facility, like Marty’s, the 10 feet in 4 seconds, should certainly be more the norm. The one thing every one of these railroads do is that they have crew watch every wheel go over every frog through every turnout, when pulling on to or off the mainline. They couple at less than 5 mph and do a “3 step” safety check before uncoupling a car or stepping between them. Try that and it will really suck up the time.
As for switching and station stops, that is more 1:1, as it takes the 1:1 guys just as long as it does us to couple, uncouple and pump up air or tie a freight car down.
This has worked on the KVRwy, but we always have the “throttle jockies” and the “turtles”, so it all works out.
