Olden Crow

The "Too Tyred Tour" video (Amazon, cheap) has an interesting part where a little group of 1970's tourists in Africa decide on the spur of the moment to jerry rig a simple device which allow the bikes to hug railroad rails.

Its a 6 year around the world tour done by poor student graduates with hardly any money. Crossing the great deserts in North Africa, deep sandy roads some hundreds miles long pose a problem. But they notice only one train a week is running on the RR track alongside their road. So they hire out as labourers in a local tool shop and fashion out a rim that allows for easy biking on the steel rails. The RR is a singletrack line with very few switchpoints, so they can fly along at high speeds not worrying about derailing!

NoReg

Quite a few people in the US do that kind of thing also. There was a period when the small rail lines were falling out of use but nobody had bothered to either pull up the steel for recycling, and/or grade the rail beds into rail trails. Folks were experimenting with riding the rails on their bikes. Unfortunately, the rail trail business has pretyt much nixed opportunities for this kind of fun. Abandoned lines are converted, or they are being sold to small operators, finding rails one can ride is nearly inpossible (that should get the examples flooding in).

If I knew where I could do it, I would build one of the following in an instant:

https://www.railriders.net/

https://www.railbike.com/default.htm

https://www.railbike.org/

https://www.cco.net/~railbike/railbike_tours.htm

https://www.railbike.de/

Hmm actually more destination info than I remembered.