CK:

In 1977 I travelled from London to Edinburgh on a train that zipped along at a dreadful pace. A fellow traveller (a phrase you wouldn't have used then, though much more pejorative 20 years earlier) used a stopwatch to clock the train's speed. He was reporting to his friend times of 35 to 37 seconds to the mile. Interestingly enough, if you know the seconds it takes to go a mile there's an almost instant conversion. Divide the number of seconds into 3600. The result is MPH. We were doing a steady 100 MPH.

I thought that was pretty high speed! Particularly since the rest of the trip we averaged around 12 MPH on our bicycles.

TTF



TEd