Human-powered rail vehicle
This article is about auxiliary railcars regardless of propulsion. For the original form powered by foot, see
dandy horse
.
A
draisine
(
) is a light auxiliary
rail vehicle
, driven by service personnel, equipped to transport crew and material necessary for the maintenance of railway infrastructure.
The eponymous term is derived from the German inventor
Baron
Karl Drais
, who invented his
Laufmaschine
(
German
for "running machine") in 1817, which was called
Draisine
in German (
velocipede
or
draisienne
in French) by the press. It is the first reliable claim for a practically used precursor to the
bicycle
, basically the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, nicknamed hobby-horse or
dandy horse
.
[1]
Later, the name draisine came to be applied only to the invention used on rails and was extended to similar vehicles, even when not human-powered. Because of their low weight and small size, they can be put on and taken off the rails at any place, allowing trains to pass.
In the United States, motor-powered draisines are known as
speeders
while
human-powered
ones are referred as
handcars
. Vehicles that can be driven on both the highway and the rail line are called
road?rail vehicles
, or (after a trademark) Hy-Rails.
Dressin, velorail, trolley, or railbike
[
edit
]
"Draisines", called
dressin
in
Swedish
,
dresin
in
Norwegian
,
dræsine
in
Danish
, and
resiina
in
Finnish
, refers to pedal-powered rail-cycles which were used by railroad maintenance workers in Finland, Sweden, and Norway until about 1950, as handcars were elsewhere.
Draisines nowadays are used for recreation on several unused railway lines in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Poland, some other European countries and South Korea.
[2]
Several companies rent draisines in Sweden.
[3]
In the United States, railbike tours have operated in several states nationwide: California,
[4]
Maine,
[5]
Oregon,
[6]
the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York,
[7]
and Delaware.
[8]
Until 2007, Finland hosted an annual competition,
Resiina-ralli
(
Draisine Rally
), involving several draisine teams travelling for many days on the railways from one corner of the country to another.
Types
[
edit
]
-
Hand-lever draisine
handcar
-
-
Functioning draisine
-
Three-wheeled draisine at the
Saskatchewan Railway Museum
exhibited by a railway history museum in
Metelen
, Germany
-
Combined pedal and hand driven railway bike in museum of
Khabarovsk Bridge
, Russia
-
Three-wheeled handcar designed to be operated by a single person, widely known in the United States as a handcar or velocipede
-
Pedaled four-wheel rail-cycle draisine
-
Purpose-built bicycle for riding the
Hotchkiss Bicycle Railroad
-
A row of draisines for hire: The railway runs between
Broby
and
Glimminge
,
Sweden
-
Speeders
is another term for a small motorized draisine.
-
Motorized draisines are known as
speeders
, trolleys, or “jiggers” in the United States and Canada.
-
Draisine for crew transport and
railway track
inspection in
Namibia
2017
-
Even this small
railbus
is related to the draisine.
[
citation needed
]
Automotive draisines
[
edit
]
-
Jeep
shunting empty coal hoppers, World War II
-
And the "Big jeep" (or "Beep"), the WWII
Dodge WC model
, was also used for draisine duty
-
-
Military use
[
edit
]
The military use of draisines concerned, first of all, armoured draisines. They were light armoured rail motor vehicles, intended for reconnaissance, scouting, track patrolling, and other auxiliary combat tasks, usually belonging to
armoured trains
. Early vehicles of this kind were built in Russia during
World War I
. Later, often
armoured cars
were used as armoured draisines, after exchanging their wheels to railroad ones, or fitting them with additional retractable railroad rollers. Some countries, however, manufactured purpose-built armoured draisines between the wars, such as the USSR and Czechoslovakia. Peculiar vehicles were Polish armoured draisines - they were
tanks
or
tankettes
fitted with special rail chassis, able to be used on rails or on the ground, leaving the rail chassis on the rails.
Some countries developed railtrack armoured draisines, with retractable railroad wheels; they were not widely used, however. Different armoured draisines were used during the
Second World War
, starting from the
invasion of Poland
by
Nazi Germany
.
Prior to World War II, the Japanese Empire had already made extensive use of draisines such as the
Sumida M.2593
in the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria
and the
Sino-Japanese War
.
[9]
From 1952, the
Wikham Armoured Trolley
was used by British security forces during the
Malayan Emergency
.
[10]
Construction
[
edit
]
People have been putting bicycles on railroad tracks ever since there have been both bicycles and railroads. From time to time, factory-built models have been available, beginning with a device marketed in 1908 through the
Sears
catalogue for just US$5.45 (equivalent to $185 in 2023).
There are many designs of draisine. However, certain fundamentals of railbike design must be adhered to, foremost among them the reconciliation of a bicycle's stability with adaptation to riding on a
railway track
: bicycles are kept upright by the rider steering in the direction of an impending fall, but this ability is sacrificed when the bicycle is constrained by rails. Simply adding flanged wheels to a conventional bicycle would make it impossible to balance, so the typical approach to stabilization is to add an
outrigger
, with roller(s), across to the second rail from near the bicycle’s rear wheel. Even such an outrigger system is not without its complications, as tracks that are no longer perfectly parallel ? common on sections of abandoned track ? can result in
derailment
. Additional guide rollers can help alleviate this problem at the expense of greater weight.
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
Media related to
Draisines
at Wikimedia Commons