Oregon Cycling Magazine

by William Ross, age 15

We recently built a railbike here at CAT for a private landowner in Deadwood named Ray Robinson. Ray is a landscaper and a former professional railman who has built himself a Grand Scale railroad on his property called the Meadows and Lake Kathleen Railroad. Hobbyists consider Grand Scale railroads to be just one step below the real thing.  The Meadows and Lake Kathleen railroad is 18” gauge, meaning that the rails are 18 inches apart.  The engines and cars that run on the rails are big enough for a person to ride in, and one of the engines we saw weighs 6000 pounds.

Ray had been interested for some time in the possibility of a railbike, and contacted CAT to see if we could pull it off.  Enticing us with stories about the 30-foot tunnel and the 350-foot trestle that takes you 21 feet above the ground, Ray convinced us to take on the project.  He brought out a railcar platform that had once held an electric motor and a lawn chair.  We were tasked with turning it into a human-powered vehicle.

First, we had to decide what we wanted it to look like. We went online and looked in magazines and journals for previously successful designs—recumbents with outriggers, two side-by-side recumbents, and other interesting concepts.   Not many people were building on a platform like we had.  Eventually we decided to mount an underused tandem onto the center for the railcar.

Now we needed to figure out how to make it go. We decided to put an internal hub on the bike but we didn’t have a wheel to mount it on because the wheels were on the platform.  We made a false axle on the platform and mounted the tandem to those. Instead of the hub turning a wheel it turns another hub that goes down to the rear axle of the railcar, thus providing the forward momentum we were looking for.

We quickly figured out that engineering the railbike (no pun intended) was going to be more complicated than we originally thought.  For example, the platform, like all railcars, is made to flex a little.  If they were too rigid, the cars would derail every time they went over warped or uneven track.  It was hard to find a way to support the bike without reducing the flex.  We welded some heavy-duty springs to either side of the bike frame and attached them to the rail platform at a diagonal.  That way the front of the tandem frame was able to flex from side to side with the platform and not be in danger of tipping over.

Another complicated problem was what gear ratio we would use to make pedaling the contraption comfortable.  We figured that out by doing some calculations and using a formula we got from our Math class.

Once we knew our optimal gear ratio, we wanted to know how fast we were going to be able to go, so we decided to attach a speedometer, which turned out to be its own problem.  Normally, the speedometer has a little wheel that touches the top of a moving bike wheel to figure out how fast the wheel is turning.  If you know the exact size of your wheel, you can know how fast you are traveling. Here is the problem: wheels on a bike have air pressure and the weight of a person on the bike will deform the tire.  Normally, the speedometer adjust for that deformation,  but we were mounting it on a steel wheel of a different size than a bike wheel so the speedometer wheel also had to be smaller, But by how much? It took some time and calculations, but we got it right.

After we got the railbike in as close to working order as we could get in our workshop, we needed to test ride it, so we took a field trip to Deadwood.  We had been told about the railroad and even seen pictures of it on the internet, but we were still surprised to see how beautiful the Meadows and Lake Kathleen Railroad is. From Ray’s house you can see the track receding into the distance and disappearing behind a stand of trees. The track is about three quarters of a mile long, and is about 80 percent complete.  The landscaping for the railroad is amazing—even more impressive than the track itself in many ways.  Ray is an expert at making artificial rocks and ponds, and really put all his skills to work on his property.  Ray considers himself to be an artist more than a railroader, and looking at his achievements, it is not hard to understand what he means.

Once we got the railbike on the track outside the train barn, it was time to test it out. Since the track is not yet a complete circuit, we were going to have to turn the bike around on the track once we got to the end.  The bike is not considered heavy by railroad standards—less than 200 lbs without riders—but still requires two people to move safely.  Good thing we decided on a tandem!  We were warned not to start off too fast and to lean into curves so that we could get a feel for the physical forces involved.  Once we got comfortable with the feeling, we were able to take the bike to just about maximum speed, between 20 and 25 miles per hour!  It was quite exciting on the straight sections of track, but a little harrowing on the bend in the trestle.

All in all, the railbike worked quite well except for a few small issues.  The speedometer seemed to be off by a little bit and the shifters skipped a little at first. We were able to fix those problems on site. There were a couple larger problems that we had to return back to the shop with.  The handlebars, for instance, were getting in the way during operation, and the gearing needed to be adjusted a little to make pedaling easier.

After helping to build the railbike, I feel lucky to be one of the few people to actually ride on rails using human power.  Unless you own your own railroad or know where there is some abandoned line, it is difficult to gain access to railroad tracks where you can pursue a railbike hobby.  As Ray told us, projects like this are special because you have to make everything yourself.  There’s no place you can go to buy a railbike like we made, for example, because the specifications are so unique.  That’s why he had to search us out to make his idea come to life, and we are very thankful that he did.

Possibly Related

• September 2008: Ashland welcomes custom framebuilders
• March 2007: Don't let bike theft happen to you
• November 2006: Making treasure out of trash
• May 2008: Collecting oddball bikes
• July 2007: What I learned in school this year