That's a bit less than 22.5 miles X 22.5 miles.
Rather giant for foot traffic, not so much for a train. Even if ran completely around the outside, that 90 miles. Running the train at 10 MPH gets you around the track in 9 hours, not 48.
Agreed.
Are we sure they've been on the train for two whole days?
They first got on it in the middle of one night, then we know there's been a second night when William and Dolores got...uhhh...intimate...then when he wakes up in the morning the train suddenly stops and then they're off.
So, it's possible that they've only been on the train for only a little more than one day, depending on what time they actually got on it after the giant orgy party...figure they get on the train at 3am, then the train stops at 8am, that's only 29 hours.
That's also if the train didn't stop at all that we weren't shown...trains tend to stop quite a bit even today, so I imagine that in the 1800s they probably stopped even more often.
It is an awfully hard detail to just kind of ignore, though...it does seem that they've been on the train for far longer than what it would seem possible given the stated size of the park.
One thing that I had wondered was maybe the park is 500 square miles, but it's actually divided up into small areas that are actually only being accessed by this train...like maybe Pariah is actually a separate parcel of land owned by the park that is separate from the "main" area that includes Sweetwater. If you owned "500 square miles" of ONLY the area large enough for a train track, you'd own a LOT more than just 500 miles of track...so if they own basically the land that the train runs on for certain areas, but NOT the land around it, that ends up giving them quite a bit of real estate that is only slightly wider than the train track...so if they owned parcels of land, and then the very thin "rail lines" that connected those areas, they could be a pretty great distance apart while still fitting into the 500 square miles.
I hope that makes sense...
I found a calculator that can help with the point I'm trying to make...
If you figure they'd need to own, say, 20 feet wide tracts of land in order for the railroad to function, then you could have a whopping 265 miles of track and still only have "one square mile" of land that you would own. If you cut it to only 15 feet of width, you get roughly 350 miles of length to still stay within that "one square mile" of land that you'd own.
It's also possible that we are trying to analyze something that we shouldn't really be trying to analyze...:lol