Model Railroad Speed Caculator

Friends, Saw this on another site. It should answer a lot of your questions.

www.mcr5.org/NMRA/articals/speed.htm

Cheers, Jim CCRR:)

Thanks for the thread Jim. I bookmarked it a long with the ztrains scratchbuild calculator.
Helpful information.

Thanks,
Jerry

Jim,

Stupid question but I don't know for sure. How fast should a passanger train travel on open track. Also a freight train on open track. The rest can be calculated.

TerryH

Terry, Many variables to your questions and the answers. Many things are in the mix: track condition; speed limits; size of the train etc. Most freight trains rolling across Nebraska or Manitoba are probably doing about 50-60 mph. Slower of course in the mountains. Passenger trains here in semi open California do about 55 mph. On the Eastcoast they get up to 80mph on certain routes, and faster. Back at the turn of the century steamers would consistantly run 90mph on some routes. Casey Jones and others back in the 1890's would do whatever he could get away with, sometimes 110mph. Of course many accidents happened back then, serious ones. Today the tracks and beds on the mainlines are much better and our freight train consists, weight wise, are huge compared to 100 years ago. Should North America have 150mph passenger trains? You bet. Will we? Probably not everywhere. On my layout I like my steamers rolling around at about 35mph. Seems to look right. (1940 era) Cheers, Jim CCRR:)

Excellent topic. I'll pass this tread onto Chris so he can look at it to calculate speeds when he's setting up the automatic run, slow, stop, speed up and run phases.

Thanks, Jim. You answered my concerns.

Here is another website with a speed calculator!

www.nhsouth.com/crafts/workbench/ssc.htm

Hobo Tim