BlazingPedals

Should railbikes have disc brakes or rim brakes?

indyfabz

Disc brakes for when the rails are wet. Otherwise, rim brakes are fine.

ksryder

Yup. Also highly dependent on which railroad, when the deed was granted or the land was acquired, and the language/type of deed. We've had some recent cases in Kansas where the outcome depends largely on the original language... and whether the chain of title can actually be traced through the years (record keeping in some of our rural counties is less than desirable.)

Of course, it's a lot easier to just repeat random things I heard from some guy, without any research or inquiry, as carved-in-stone fact.

scott967

IIRC in Illinois there wasn't direct government deeding of land, but there were laws making it easy for railroads to obtain land for ROW. Much of Lincoln's law business was in representing railroads or landowners in appellate cases concerning land sales. The problem for the transcontinental railroads was that rail construction was capital intensive. After the civil war, the money supply (a good fraction was United States notes aka Greenbacks or Legal Tenders ) was fixed and eventually the Greenbacks withdrawn from circulation as the Specie Resumption Act kicked in. So raising capital in the financial markets was difficult and the US govt didn't have money to directly invest. The best it could do was offer land which could serve as collateral for bonds. The railroads had to complete a certain amount of trackage. Railroad bonds flooded the credit markets and helped bring about financial panics in 1872 and 1882. The Credit Mobilier scandal with the Union Pacific has created the image of "greedy railroads" though I have seen some analysis that attempted to demonstrate that Credit Mobilier wasn't a scam but more of a derivative financing scheme. The Franco-Prussian War didn't help as it tended to pull all available specie in Europe to the belligerents. The Northern Pacific went broke in 82 though my reading of it is that the railroad was mainly run by banker/financial types who couldn't/didn't obtain sufficient engineering talent to construct the road at an efficient cost.

Much is made of the Great Northern (I guess this is now Warren Buffet's BNSF) not getting any federal land, but if you look at the initial railroad purchased to form the basis of that railroad it was built on land obtained from the state of Minnesota.

As far as the railbiking, I would like to see some way of folding it so where the rail wasn't passable you could ride more like an MTB. Having to carry that contraption across the washouts and what-not didn't look fun.

scott s.
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AdventureManCO 

Wow, this is fascinating. Thank you for sharing, @oldnslow2

exmechanic89

^ This is the online forum way and tradition.

indyfabz

There are organized rail riding tours with rail-specific pedaling machines.

E.g.:

https://www.railexplorers.net

https://www.revrail.com

Lemond1985

Uh oh, I hope "Critical Mass" doesn't start doing these type of rides on tracks that are in use.