The Rail Bike Lives!

The rail bike made the maiden voyage yesterday. It runs down the tracks pretty much like it was made to, surprisingly enough. The outrigger wheel could be out just a little more to center it up on the rail a little better and the wheel on the bottom of it seems to be a little noisy but it works.

Here's the rundown on the bike set-up. I started with a Schwinn Varsity girls bike that a former student gave me. I read somewhere on the internet when I started contemplating this project that a girls bike is the way to go because of the difficulty getting on and off with the extra height of the track. This one wasn't much of a prize with all of the chrome being pretty rusty and the wheels rusty to the point there wasn't any chrome left on them at all. Because it had nice horizontal dropouts, I converted it to a single speed. You don't really need much of a speed selection on railroad tracks because the grade that a train can navigate normally doesn't exceed about 3%. I put a couple of other wheels I had laying around on it and bought two new tires. I also put a couple of new brake cables and some better brake pads I swapped out from one of my other bikes.

The outrigger upright is made from a piece of aluminum tubing and a caster wheel I had in my box of misc. wheels and casters. The arms are 1/2" thinwall conduit. They are bolted to the bike frame in three locations with ears welded to the frame. The front guide is made from 1/8" sheet metal with old skate board wheels used to keep it aligned to the track. The wheels are adjustable for width to get a snug fit on the rail. Two other wheels ride on top of the rail (see previous rail bike post for photo). This assembly is connected to the bike fork by a couple of angle iron arms bolted to a boss on each fork leg. These will allow it to pivot upward if I get around to adding the lifting rod and handle.

Total cost for the whole thing is probably less than $30.00. I remember the tires were ten bucks each and the 1/2" EMT is about $1.25/stick. If I wasn't such a junk collector it still wouldn't cost more than $75.00 as long as you had a donor bike. If you had to pay someone to fab all of this crap together, it would be a different story. If you figured in research time on the internet and engineering time, it would be a whole lot less than cost effective. However, one of the great benefits of being a shop teacher is being able to work on this goofy crap on company time or at least using the facility whenever you want. If, after putting a few miles on the thing, it seems like it's going to hold up alright, I'll get some yellow paint and rattle can the rest of the parts to kind of match up with the bike color and to prevent it from rusting. Actually, as bad as the bike looks, it wouldn't hurt to paint the whole thing.

So where to ride the thing? There's a train museum not too far from here that offers excursions. They have about ten miles of track that runs from their yard to another little town. They only run Saturday afternoons from May to October and the occasional extra on Sundays. The track runs through some nice bucolic country and there's only a few grade crossings. Spend an hour or so each way with a couple of photo stops and it will make for a nice Sunday outing. The outrigger will unbolt and fold flat against the side of the bike. With a little more work I can rig up a couple of brackets to hold it in place easily enough. That way I can fold the thing up and ride the bike to a restaurant for breakfast, then put it back together, throw it back on the tracks and come home. It should be fun.


The screaming you hear at the end of the video is the Missus hollering at the cat. The cat wanted to climb up the Missus' leg because I interrupted her lunch so she could video tape my maiden voyage and the cat smelled the bacon she had been eating.