Treatise against the fast clock.

Image from Monty Python's "Life of Brian" found on Google

Well the last post sparked a lot of discussion, so I figured now was as good a time as any to drop this bomb. I am not a fan of the fast clock never have been, and probably never will be.  There I said it, I can just picture the wringing of hands from the scale police and the model railroad purists out there.  I do not like the concept of fast clocks, can't you just see someone standing there like John Cleese in a Monty Python film yelling "He said it again!!!!" The fast clock seems to be one of those sacred cows in model railroading that everyone feels obligated to have.

There are several reasons I dont like the fast clock ranging from destroying the realism that we have fought so hard to create, to just plain turning people off to operations.  One bad fast clock experience can make it so that a person new to operations never wants to participate in an ops session again.  Before you scoff at this last statement, let me just say that it has been probably 20 to 25 years since I had an extremely bad experience at an ops session, mostly due to the fast clock and I am just now considering getting into operations again.

 

On another note, I still have zero interest in TTTO ops mostly because of the need for a fast clock and it all stems from that one experience, but we will get to that in a bit.  So whether you call it blasphemy, a manifesto or a treatise, please just bear with me and hear me out.  At the end of the day I will respect your opinion, as long as you aren't trying to proselytize,  so I hope you will respect mine and atleast understand how I got here.

The first item I take issue with in the use of a fast clock is that certain activities dont scale down time wise.  The first of these is comprehension, it takes us just as long to comprehend something in the model world as in the real world. Reading a signal aspect, understanding the dispatchers instructions or reading a switchlist are all things that no matter how hard we try we cant do any faster when on a fast clock.

Going hand and hand with comprehension is writing and speaking. We dont write or talk any faster in the layout room than we normally do, this means that filling out paperwork takes an in inordinately long time in the model world.  Likewise recieving copying and repeating train orders takes an eternity depending on the ratio used for the fast clock. That 3 minute conversation with the dispatcher just cost you 12 minutes on a 4:1 fast clock, almost a quarter hour.

Switching is another activity that takes longer in the model world than the real world.  Except in the most perfectly executed model railroad it is nearly impossible to kick cars. Likewise other moves that crews have utilized to speed up the prototype practice such as the much frowned upon flying switch are not possible as the physics just dont scale down.  Instead we must spot each car exactly were it goes sometimes running the entire length of a yard track. This takes time and all those seconds add up to scale minutes.

My next issue with the fast clock is we all end up being a slave to the fast clock, some more than others.  Some people figure they need the fast clock to make it appear the train covered a greater distance durning an op session. In TTTO ops the clock is king so in order to simulate schedule the layout owner wants to simulate they pick a fast clock ratio based soley on how long the op session will run. If they are simulating 8 hours during a 4 hour session then they use a ratio of 2:1 however if they want to simulate 12 hours in the same time they would use 3:1. I have seen some insane ratios used such as 6:1, if you feel the need to run a 6:1 fast clock then you probably are trying to either fit too much prototype railroad into a tiny layout space, or should have picked a busier prototype.

Running that high fast clock ratio so that you can model the 2 trains that ran on that line in the same op session makes no sense. In fact I find that about as realistic for a "prototype based layout" as adding industries that never existed in order to boost traffic and "enhance" operations.  If you feel you need to run that many trains pick another prototype or freelance, theres nothing wrong with that.  Traffic volume is a componant of what makes a line interesting, and when we artificially create this volume either through changes in number of trains or overly compressing the time between trains it detracts from the ambiance of the modeled area.

I said I would get back to that bad experience so here we go.  I once accompanied my father to the house of another club member for the monthly business meeting, mostly because my dad said there was a completed layout in the basement and after the meeting we would run trains.  I think I would have been 13 or 14 at the time, So after meeting we adjourned to the basement and the owner, who is long since deceased so I dont think I will step on any toes with this story, explained his operating scheme to us and asked for volunteers. There were two jobs, a road job and a yard job, I forget who grabbed the road job but no one wanted the yard job so I.gladly took it. 

In hindsight that should have been the first clue I was about to have a bad day. During this op session I had to classify an entire yard before the road job got there at a set time so that cars could be added to the road job and taken to all points wherever. So as I am going about doing this the layout owner is hovering over me the entire time, and telling me I needed to pick up the pace. So since I cant read the switch list and numbers on the cars any faster naturally I crack open the throttle more. Unbeknownst to me the layout owner had installed a speedometer on the fascia and the second I got above the stated yard speed he started berating me about my speed so I slowed it back down. 

Needless to say the road job came and went and came back after negotiating the reverse loop and I still wasn't done switching the yard so I got berated some more.  Among the other problems with the op session, this guy was such a slave to the fast clock and so focused on it, that he couldn't take the time from watching the fast clock to help a first time operator and the resulting experience turned me off to formal operations for atleast two decades.

Now for the destroying realism part I am sure you have all been waiting for. The final reason I dislike the fast clock is scale speeds which is kind of a pet peeve of mine. We spend so much time getting our trains to run at a realistic speed, this isn't tinplate after all. The problem is scale miles per hour is just that, scale miles per hour. when we adjust the duration of our time units we must also adjust our train speeds accordingly and unless you are running a clock in real time you should be concerned with scale miles per scale hour.  Therefore the faster the clock ratio the faster the trains need to move.  Think about it, back in the analog VHS days (digital formats tend to skip when fast forwarding) when you hit fast forward everything moved faster.  This opinion of mine probably has a lot to do with my being raised in a household of scientists and having to always make sure all units were appropriate and agreeable for any given scenario and having to notate anytime a variable such as time was changed. For the record my father is no fan of the fast clock either. 

I guess it goes back to a point I made in the previous post about rivet counting and these are the rivets I choose to count.  I prefer operating methods that can be done in real time.  If you have a long enough mainline run your operators arent going to care that it only took them 30 minutes to an hour to cover a geographic distance the prototype takes 8 to 12 hours to cover.  with sequential dispatching and track warrents, clearances can be given in real time, likewise CTC does not require a fast clock.  In the end you have to do whats right for you, its your railroad and your journey.