Bentley Railbike (2000) | Hacker News Reader

Bentley Railbike (2000)

rrbike.freeservers.com

122 pointsKaibeezy67 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20210609122054/http://rrbike.fre...

Thanks!

These are pretty common in Sweden: they’re called dressin here, which, as is usual for a lot of Swedish words, comes from the French. In English it’s draisine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draisine

If you’re in Skåne I can recommend Romeleåsens Dressincykling: https://www.dressincykling.se/english/

The more permanent, tourist ones are also becoming more common in Poland. https://poland.pl/tourism/active-leisure/draisine-trips-thro... Similar name is used.

Ha I rode something like this with 2 stroke motors involved in Colombia. Everyone just jumps off and removes the car when another is coming in the other direction.

I doubt it's coming from French since initial invention was made in Germany. It's Draisine in Engligh, French, German, and in many languages it's called similarly, sometimes with little spelling deviations.

Correct. Wikipedia says it was named after the inventor Karl Drais who invented the dandy horse, the predecessor to the bicycle. Interestingly, he did not invent the Draisine on rails, though, just another mode of transport that in some ways is very similar.

I was a bit confused at first since in French, the word "Draisienne" is used for the dandy horse itself. But apparently Draisine is also in use in French (first time I heard about it, native speaker). You learn new things everyday !

I have to wonder, what is the scale of a train in Sweden? here in the states the vast majority of our locomotives are dedicated solely to freight.

Speaking from experience having worked on locomotive engines in the past, the sheer magnitude of US rail is difficult to comprehend. a fully loaded freight train can weigh north of 20,000 tons (18.14 million kilos). They can often times be nearly 2 (3.2km) miles long. and heres the reason "rail bikes" are illegal in the US:

they can take more than a mile (1.6km) to stop.

Railbikes only go on tracks no longer used for regular traffic.

Sorry for the offtopicness but we don't have your email. I just saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26721647. Since your comments have mostly been fine since we banned you (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26649016), I'd be happy to reinstate your account. However, I think the username is a bit too trollish. It's not extreme of course, but the audience here is large enough that even minor trollishness can cause major weirdness. If you want to pick a different username, we can change it for you and unban the account.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Thank you. How do I pick a different username?

It's best to email hn@ycombinator.com but if you really don't want to do that you can just reply here.

Ok dang, please reinstate me. :)

And thanks for going above and beyond.

Happy to reinstate you but we need you to pick a different username first!

I've restored your recent comments which are fine for HN but I don't want to unban you without renaming the account because then I'll forget that we still need to do that.

As far as I know, the heaviest trains in Sweden run on the Iron Ore line[1]: ”68 cars long and weigh 8600 tonnes”.

I would surprised if rail bikes are allowed on any ’live’ track anywhere in the EU.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ore_Line

DYI with a bike motor used as a local mode of transportation on Russian abandoned railways.

https://youtu.be/M9O1h_PtAo8?t=89 - in this specific case that is the only transportation connecting a remote (20 miles) village with a town where minimal services are available.

That looks not far off being a community run train!

In similar vein, there’s this[1] cool looking thing in Germany.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lüttmoorsiel-Nordstrandischmoo...

Also in the movie Stalker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk1PxpZ-hfE

The pictures are great

http://rrbike.freeservers.com/Railbikes_and_Railbiking_Pictu...

So nice that these old handmade sites are still around

The videos are even more impressive. For reasons known only to Google, 'rail bike' videos swarmed my YouTube feed a few years back. There are some stunning shots of going over trestles — GoPro held at arms length over the edge.

I emailed the chap who runs the site and got a reply! He said he simply hasn't updated the site for a while because he's been busy doing other things. Great to know he's still keeping busy : )

I recall researching those about 30 years back. And reading that they are explicitly outlawed in the US.

They are not outlawed - but pretty expensive. I imagine you are paying for use of the rail.

Check out the Skunk Train rail bikes in Fort Bragg California. https://www.skunktrain.com/railbikes/

Here is a discussion of the price. It turns out they raised the price by 500%!

https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/sacramento/railbike...

Blank page due to ad block. What's the gist?

No blocked in a region unlikely to be targeted by the ads at least.

They started off at $50 per person on a two-seater railbike, but went up to $250 for the bike ride (so a 150% increase from $100 to $250, or 2.5x increase).

The explanation was along the lines of "it's what the experience costs, we started off low to gain some steam, but adjusted to actual price later". Their railbikes have electric assist systems too, and the rides are around 90 minutes.

Phew, in Germany those things typically cost somewhere between 35 and 80 € (so around 40 to 95 $) when the pricing is per bike, and the standard model of rail bike that's popular around here usually fits up to four people.

And in some cases the available route length is quite a bit longer than the seven or fifteen miles mentioned in that article.

This website makes me happy and brings warm fuzzy feelings like opening an old book I haven't looked at for decades. And then this " 471259 potential RAILBIKERS have enjoyed this ADIRONDACK site since 10 MARCH 2000. "

A webcounter! Echoes of a more fun web.

Now I want a side by side tandem. Not that I could ride it anywhere near where I live...

Ride one from the comfy seat behind your desk! https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=PRN-railfilm

I clicked the link expecting a larger contraption like those paddle boats but with a small desk, so I can take a relaxing ride through the countryside while I work remotely on my laptop.

Get one of those under-the-desk bike peddle exercise machines and play the video on a TV in the background.

Different design, but in the same spirit there's company in upstate NY doing railbike tours https://www.revrail.com/

and one that does 4 locations, I did the one in Rhode Island a couple of years ago, it was fun - https://www.railexplorers.net

those are similar to the rail bikes in Oregon: https://ocrailriders.com

unfortunately, this particular one is closed, but there are others in the state.

I love this website.

That is one old-school website. Brought back some fun memories!

Is there a motorcycle version?

I think it's called a "train"? :P

It only becomes a train when there's multiple things in a row.

what if the real train comes?

Direct quote from the site:

ALWAYS KEEP IN MIND, you should use railbikes ONLY on ABANDONED lines!!

Sounds like the disclaimer they use when selling e-scooters... ("this is not for the road etc.")

Or another Railbike travelling in the opposite direction?

Then you stop, take one off the rails and swap positions.

If it’s like the ones I’ve been on, you either lift them off the rails, or if you’re just hiring them, sometimes just both turn yours the other way and swap.

Definitely an issue with personal rail travel, whether from the opposite direction or an unclearable traffic jam in the same direction, and whether two rails or mono.

The ones I've rode look like these[0], so in case they are running in different directions, you can easily lift up the one side with just one wheel on both vehicles, and then just push them. Simple and not a heavy lift either.

[0] https://hemomkringvandring.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...

Obviously you must stick to the schedule to allow for passing of oncoming or overtaking rail traffic at sidings.

One of you gets off the track to allow the other to pass.

A normal bicycle can be lifted in one hand. This looks more unwieldy but not too much heavier. It shouldn't be hard.

(If two riders are both so oblivious that neither sees the other coming from at least a quarter-mile off, they deserve to crash.)

From the pictures, it looks like it has plastic guide wheels but if it were conductive to short out the two rails, it would activate the signals and any trains will be stopped before they reach you.

Do not ever rely on this sort of safety mechanism. There are also systems in use that rely on axle counters and bookkeeping - basically, on each block they count the incoming and the outgoing axles. When your draisine now is either too lightweight to trigger an axle counter or you set it on the rails in the middle of a block, the ops central won't know you are there.

Even simpler, there are systems that use a physical token.

To proceed into a section of track, the train driver/guard must physically possess an object, typically handed over at a station just before the section, and returned just after.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_(railway_signalling)

Never knew about axle counters. In the UK, they use a jumper cable to stop trains in an emergency.

While the UK has indeed stuck to almost exclusively using track circuits for a very long time [1], within the last two decades axle counters have become much more common.

[1] With some exceptions – the Severn Tunnel e.g. was switched to axle counters already in 1987 because track circuits proved too unreliable within the (wet) environment of the tunnel.

Reminds me of the bamboo train in Cambodia. Pretty cool.

I'm embarassed to admit I thought this would be a bike that moved at the speed of a railgun.

And I thought it was going to be an old rail bike design from Bentley, the car manufacturer.

Why in 2021 are websites not available over https?

Looking at the source, it appears the website hasn't been updated since 2014... for a possible reason, that could be one

It doesn't look like this site was made anywhere near 2021.

I love that you looked at this website, saw its <table> layout, saw the copyright was the year 2000, saw the images with terrible drop shadows, the freeservers icon in the top, and thought “uh, weird this isn’t https”.

More likely they have HTTPS-only on so it turns into a error condition. Thankfully such sites are rare now.

Aside: Paul Graham's blog that is frequently front-paged on here doesn't support HTTPS. That has always seemed odd.

I too have HTTPS-only set, it's interesting what isn't HTTPS in 2021.

http://www.open-std.org/ is the site that maintains lots of documents for the Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1.

Historically both ISO and the IEC worked on IT standards. But obviously it's no good if there's an ISO international standard for how to encode the letter 'A' as binary data and a separate IEC standard for how to do it. In the best case this is pointless duplication of effort (these are international standards groups, every country is ultimately involved) and in the worst case they diverge and there's actual conflict, defying the purpose of standardization. So, the Joint Technical Committee does work on this intersection on behalf of both IEC and ISO.

Now, the importance of these standards to everybody means it certainly can be argued that the site must remain forever accessible to those without HTTPS but it's hard to think of any reason to just not implement HTTPS at all...

It's not even written in React!

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