New member Pete Wright brought along his latest acquisition on Wednesday night to demonstrate to other members: an Accutrack II Speedometer from Sprog DCC. It’s quite a neat little self contained unit, battery powered and self supporting with a perspex ‘tunnel’ for the train to run through.

It supports multiple scales [US‑N (1:160), UK‑N (1:148), US-HO (1:87.1) and UK-OO (1:76.2)] and the speed display can be in miles-per-hour or kilometers-per-hour. The tunnel is quite wide and tall — big enough for double N‑gauge track, or a single HO line with double stack containers.

Speed sensing is done using infra-red sensors — an LED and diode at each end of the unit pick up the train as it traverses the tunnel by breaking the reflected beam off the white card on the far side of the tunnel. Some quick testing showed a little variation in repeated passes of a light loco through the tunnel at a constant speed — but this may have been due to variations in the speed of the loco itself.

Thanks Pete!