Scale Speed

I have an ECOS 50200 controller, which I plan to post about.  One of the nifty features of it is the ability to set a speed the displayed speed for each locomotive.  That is, you give it a speed value for each engine that represents what dialing in 100% speed corresponds to.  I'm a professional geek, and so I couldn't resist.

I looked up the published top speeds of each of my locomotives (thanks wiki) and made a spreadsheet.  Then using Anyrail (which I totally recommend BTW) I created a simple loop of kato unitrack, measured it in software as being 3.51m long, and them built it on a spare table.  3.51m scales up to 561 real meters, so that seemed big enough to get a reasonable sample.  Because it's unitrack I know exactly how long a loop it is, there's no fuzzy numbers, easy peasy.   So, my next step was to work out how long a lap should take each engine when running at their real max speed, in scale.  I worked that out in my excel sheet and came up with this table:

CE 6/8 Green	65	11.3	31.1
BR Class 48	70	12.2	28.9
SBB AE 8/14	100	17.4	20.2
SBB AM 4/4	140	24.3	14.4
CE 6/8 Brown	65	11.3	31.1
SBB AE 6/6 Green	125	21.7	16.2
DB V60	60	10.4	33.7
SBB RE 482 cargo	140	24.3	14.4
S 3/6 Green	120	20.8	16.8
SBB AE 4/4	140	24.3	14.4
CN SD40-2	105	18.2	19.3
DB V300	120	20.8	16.8
SBB AE 6/6 Red	125	21.7	16.2

So now all that was left to do was run each engine about a lap, time it, and adjust the CVs for max speed till they were as close as possible to the number in the right hand column.   The Selectrix locomotives, having fewer speed steps, were hard to get dialed in right, but other than that it was trouble free and rather rewarding. So what's the end result?  On my ECOS unit I can now take any locomotive, set it for 60 KMH, and get that actual speed, in scale.  It's not all exact, but it's close, which is all I care about.  No longer are my crocodiles passing the AM 4/4, and so I am happy. Also of note, the one Kato engine I have was doing over 450 scale KMH with factory settings on a MRC decoder.  Yikes.