Originally Posted by TandemGeek

Although not definitive and occasionally out of date, I put thetandemlink.com on line about six years ago to address your very problem as there wasn't much on the Web to help folks looking for information on tandems and tandeming.

Before buying our first tandem back in '96 (or was it '97?), I knew a bit about tandems as my former S.O.'s brother and wife were cycling enthusiasts in Seattle. He was (and may still be) the King County bicycle and equestrian planning director, a USCF / UCI official, and his spouse was basically a cycling animal even cycling to work up and until a week or so delivering their first child. They even did the "tandem as a wedding present" thing spending their honeymoon cycling the West coast from Seattle to Los Angeles with parents driving SAG. Visiting them in Seattle, I was introduced to Elliott Bay Cycles, owner Bob and resident bike builder Bill Davidson back in ‘86. I'd never seen much in the way of high-end tandems and EBC was flush with them. A subsequent visit to Bud’s Bike Shop in Clairmont, California closer to home (noting it was Santana’s home shop, owned and operated by Bill McCready along with several other stores in Southern California) gave me even greater access to tandems and folks with tandem knowledge. I was smitten, but had no outlet as I failed to cultivate any tandem interest with my S.O..

Fast forward to 1996, having relocated to Georgia where I found and then married my soul-mate, I’d been doing my thing with cycling and as a result didn’t see much of Debbie on the weekends. To fill this void in quality time, I asked her if she had any interest in tandeming. She was and I discovered that a co-worker and her husband who cycled also had recently acquired a tandem. Cool! I did a little homework, Yahoo’d the Web and learned a little about tandems, got a Santana catalog, and also got in touch with Jack & Susan Goertz at Tandems Limited in Birmingham, about 2 hours from our home in Georgia. I’ll skip the tandem selection & buying experience but, needless to say, it was VERY difficult to find information regarding tandems as a newbie 10 years ago. However, after visiting Tandems Ltd we had our Santana Arriva, a copy of ‘The Tandem Scoop’ and were signed up for TCA’s newsletter so that we could come up to speed and stay informed on tandem happenings. We were also given an Email address for a guy in Atlanta who had recently established a mailing list for a quasi-tandem club called PEACHES that had recently started to hold monthly tandem rides in the Atlanta areas. Through Rich – the guy in Atlanta – I also learned about a tandem enthusiasts mailing list (aka, listserve) called Tandem@Hobbes and an excellent publication called Tandems & Family Cycling Magazine.

The Tandem@Hobbes listserve turned out to be the best resource for gaining access to information regarding tandems and connecting to other enthusiasts: this is where those in the know would share their knowledge interactively and near-real-time, to include folks like Santana’s Bill McCready, Co-Motion’s Dwan Shepard, daVinci’s Todd Shusterman, Glenn Erickson, Dennis Bushnell, folks from Bilenky, Sheldon Brown, Peter White, Jobst Brandt every now and again, and many other fountains of knowledge and experience. The Tandems & Family Cycling (T&FC) Web site was also a pretty good resource in that there were somewhat objective, very well-written reviews of several different brands of tandems that finally added balance to the Santana marketing data I had read. In fact, it was David Morgan’s excellent review of an Erickson tandem that eventually led us and four other couples from Atlanta to sell our Santana tandems and acquire Ericksons between ’98 and ‘00. The links, article archives, interactive classified ads, and other information hosted at T&FC’s website was far more comprehensive than TCA’s web site which, in retrospect, was essentially marketing info for TCA membership and the Newsletter via a few snippets (travel & rally reports) from the magazine and static snapshots of the important event list and classified ads extracted from the most current, bi-monthly edition of TCA’s newsletter.

However, both the T&FC & TCA websites were somewhat limited in their true value to consumers as the folks who ran them also ran commercial enterprises. Thus, in that TCA's leadership & newsletter editors ran a tandem business and also sold ads in TCA's newsletter, there was no interest in freely making information regarding other tandem dealers, tandem builders, or other tandem-related businesses available. The same was true for T&FC in that they survived based on ad revenue and, like all other bicycling magazines, tended to be generous in their comments about the products and services of their paid advertisers and made little mention of others except during the annual buyers guide edition.

Somewhere around 1999 T&FC ceased publication and their Website went into a dormant mode. No longer would the club links, event listings, etc… be updated. It was shortly thereafter that I decided to greatly expand my personal website’s tandem cycling page of links into what became http://www.thetandemlink.com. Given that I launched my site as a non-commercial, non-revenue generating personal website, I was not encumbered by alliances or business relationships and was able to pretty much include links to anything that I felt was of value to tandem enthusiasts. Thus, a comprehensive list of links to tandem builders – large and small – as well as tandem specialty dealers, tour operators, and anything else that I happened upon that I felt tandem enthusiasts might benefit from made their way onto my site. Alas, the sheer size of the site, numbers of links, volatility in URLs/domains, and the need to move the site between different hosts has probably taken its toll over the years, but to this day it remains pretty much the most comprehensive list of tandem related links on the Web and a frequent source for link & information harvesting by other sites.

Anyway, less I digress, getting back to TCA. Before the internet, Tandem@Hobbes, and T&FC, the TCA and its newsletter were the only game in town and the membership rolls which were three-times those of today, reflecting its value to the tandem community. However, with Wade Blomgren’s launch of the Tandem@Hobbes listserve in late ’92, early embracers of the internet who were also tandem enthusiasts found a more efficient way to share information regarding the hobby and ultimately, TCA membership began to feel the effects as Tandem@Hobbes list membership continued to grow. In late 1994, T&FC began to publish a high-quality, full-color magazine that truly filled the void in tandem-related publications providing a well-edited, balanced collection of articles and features on a quarterly basis that really gave enthusiasts a much broader view of the tandem industry, technology, and travel. T&FC’s popularity further eroded TCA membership as tandem enthusiasts who preferred printed material to Email from the Tandem@Hobbes listserve had an alternative source for tandem news and information in a far more appealing package vs. the somewhat dated “newsletter format”. Unfortunately, publications like T&FC magazine can’t survive on reader subscription fees and, lacking the necessary ad revenue that a tandem-only publication could generate, as previously noted T&FC ceased publication in ’99. However, by this point, Tandem@Hobbes had grown into a robust mailing list that continued to fill the need for enthusiasts looking for real-time information and who were becoming more comfortable navigating the Web to obtain information vs. sitting by the mailbox. In the interim, there have been two other attempts at tandem publications: “Tandem” magazine which, despite being a world-class product, was overly ambitious for the available start-up capital and folded after two issues and “Recumbent & Tandem Rider” magazine (http://rtrmag.com) which after six years remains in print and is the only regular source for tandem test ride reports and related news and information. As a result, TCA membership has continued to fall to its current levels – somewhere around 1,200 members – sustained by long-time loyalists who support TCA for the nominal $15/year membership dues for a variety of reasons, and a somewhat steady inflow of new members to off-set those who roll-off each year.

As it is today, we belong because I think a national organization for tandem enthusiasts is a worthy thing to sustain and, as already indicated, $15/year is a nominal price to pay to ensure the organization remains viable. I remain disappointed that TCA doesn’t do more for the tandeming community and is, for the most part, defined by the “newsletter” which I’ll simply note is what it is and the editors make no other representations: they generally publish what members submit. The production quality and balance reflects that approach in that many of the submittals are long-winded and of marginal interest to a broad audience and lack variety. Frankly, if you’re looking for industry news and product information, I would recommend a test subscription to Recumbent & Tandem Rider Magazine. However, at the same time, TCA remains an institution that is worthy of support and more recent improvements such as those made with the website over the last two years and some newer elements of the newsletter are indicative of TCA responding to the marketplace and membership interests.

Again, if one thing is constant it's that nothing is constant. Tandem@Hobbes is a mere shadow of what it once used to be. Small cliques of newer subscribers flood the bandwidth with off-topic "noise" that is of little interest to anyone except themselves, diminishing the value of the resource and reducing the list to little more than a "chat-room" for the self-absorbed. Will Tandem@Hobbes survive? Hard to know if its just part of the ebb and flow, or if my perceived loss of its value is shared by a wider audience who have also tuned out. So, TCA while not perfect, does at least remain as the longest standing, US tandem club and outlet for sharing information and connecting tandem enthuisasts with one another and I hope it always does. In the mean time, I'm quite content here on bikeforums, gleefully engaging in my theraputic process of typing out my thoughts to a seemingly appreciative audience.

Just my .02.