Model Railway Forum

Having witnessed my daughter running the Hogwarts Express at full pelt around an 00 gauge 4x6 layout, made me wonder if that were scaled up the real life speed, what sort of speed would it be running at?
Has anyone ever gone to the trouble of working this out?

Probably a couple of hundred mph.

If you timed your loco traveling through 2 ft in 1 second that would scale up to 103 mph.........HB

It isn't so much the speed as the remarkable ability of a model train to stay on the line through curves which are far tighter than would ever be found in the real world. A Second Radius curve is nearly a scale 110 foot radius whereas on the real railway the tightest curve are 330 feet and trains go round these at just above walking pace, any faster and they fall off.

I reckon the venerable Hornby Smokey Joe travels about 200 MPH. An interesting observation about the 110 foot radius.

I never forget being shown a lovely H0 model of a Black 5, and it was built from a British H0 gauge society kit. Everything was as scale as possible. I believe the sharpest curves it would take were 16ft radius curves.

It goes to show how much compromizing we have to do and also goes to show why we get bufferlocking if we tried to use scale couplings round our sharp curves.

Very sharp curves were used on the railway network, but like our models, only certain locos could negitiate them and some curves could only be used when horse shunted at a wagon a time. Horses were used right up until the mid 1970's in Britain for shunting waggons (Up until the 1950's for standard gauge) as they had traction on narrow gauge lines to pull waggons up steel inclines (Up to a 1 in 4 (25%)) and on standard gauge lines they were very useful in confined areas where locomotives would end up being boxed in. Though I will say that there were shunting methods using ropes and capstans with a locomotive... So if one sees unusual track layouts where one thinks "How did they used to shunt wagons in there?" Well. Now you know!

Watching an episode of Sams Trains, he had an old Hornby 0-6-0 flat out on 12 Volt and it reached something like 2 mph- a scale speed of 160 mph That's a leisurely walk speed. He increased it up to 50 volts and it went quite a bit faster. Not sure if the loco survived