Smartwool Presents: Riding the Rails

[Music] didn't know it at the time but i was different than a lot of kids when i was younger my favorite toy as a three-year-old was a ball valve for plumbing and then legos came along for me and i spent hours and hours playing with legos and they're still in my room it's kind of silly i'm 30 years old and i still have these toys i made when i was 13 12. as a kid who is eventually going to become an engineer looking back now there wasn't a better tool or toy and in that time i had fallen in love with with mountain biking i was either going to farm or i was going to design and build farm equipment and then fly fishing and mountain biking really started to take over my passion [Music] so i started racing in college we started a team and then i started racing professionally and still racing my mountain bike professionally it's taken me some really cool places all over the world and you get to see what everyone's doing with mountain bikes and with bicycles and one of the things i had seen was people taking their bikes and adapting them to railroads it drew me right in [Music] one of the most efficient forms of transportation is the railroad you can move you know thousands and thousands of items and pounds of whatever cargo it is or people with pretty minimal energy input vermont new england in general used to be connected via railroad these railroads went everywhere that's how you traveled to different places but our society today has become so dependent on having things immediately and as that desire and that need becomes more prevalent these railroads are slowly getting closed and as much as that's a bummer it does open the door for this adventure a little bit in that we've got some places we can go explore before they get torn up and and that piece of history gets lost forever so this idea of going out and using the rails with our bikes to go access remote fishing and camping and maybe even some bike riding really appealed and one of the things with fishing is the harder it is to access something usually the better the fishing is the prettier the locale the whole purpose of doing this is to also to unplug to get out and experience nature firsthand not through a screen not through somebody else's account but to do this on a bike without a motor under our own power and to live and experience nature firsthand so in designing this we took some inspiration from some of the designs that were available and looked at how those ideas worked but ultimately what i went off of in designing this was making something really stable making it work for my wife my dog and i and all our gear was a different concept than what i had seen so far so one of the engineering sayings is light strong or cheap pick two you can't have all three and so going into this we decided on a few key points that were going to be really important the first one was that we had to use our mountain bikes because if we got somewhere cool and we could ride we really wanted to be able to use our our mountain bikes which eventually developed into okay let's use the mountain bike for the drive mechanism the second one was that it needed to be stable and safe and then the third one was that we wanted it to carry us parallel to each other didn't want it to be a tandem where we were front to back we wanted to ride next to each other with our dog in the middle if we're going to go experience these things together it's nice to do it with the person next to you instead of just staring at somebody's butt the whole time those were the three important ones and then we went from there and were okay how do we do this uh i had to learn to weld this is the first project i ever welded on so we started with a good welder ella had an old pair of roller blades in the basement i remembered there was an old pair of long board trucks with skateboard wheels perfect we'll do double roller blade wheels front and back on each side and then we'll use the skateboard wheels perpendicular to that as the guides because they're nice and thick so as the rail thickness changes were okay and so once we had gotten the materials and more or less the design figured out it actually seemed like it was going to happen as the wheels started to go together we kept things square and we kept it strong and things happen in front of you really quick you go from an idea that when you go to build it comes to life really quick and so that night we actually got the trolley if you will running and we decided we had to go test it so we loaded it up and went down to the railroad and gave it a push and it was wild it glided so smooth when with so little effort i think we gave it two kicks and we went probably a hundred feet and had to put the brakes on to stop because we were in the darkness so then from there it was time to put the mounts on for the bicycle we set it up so with a shim of plywood we could change between 29 inch and 27.5 [Music] and then we put the decking on and it was a pretty solid success [Music] here we go [Music] [Music] [Applause] it's kind of crazy [Music] [Applause] [Music] these railways have been in use for a long time you kind of forget that a that a defunct railroad it actually takes quite a lot to maintain a railway and keep it passable you know there's trees and branches all it takes is a fallen tree on the railroad and then we've gotta get off dismount so when you're out there on a on a human-powered vehicle there's no motor there's no extra sound it's just the sound of the rollers on the tracks you get to experience it the way it was intended so we've seen all sorts of stuff we wouldn't have seen had we been on a train or on a motorized vehicle and you really do get to dissolve everything away from our daily lives and unplug i had been so focused on this really intense sport of mountain biking and training and just trying to be faster faster and that finding this balance in fly fishing and nature it's a very freeing experience [Music] so [Music] life is hectic and honestly doing this project seemed like it was unnecessary at the time it seemed like more work than i had time for you know we all have busy lives but life is short you don't get to do it twice and taking the time to do a project like this i think it's really important everything's uncertain and so when you you take on a project like this it can open doors we've got this rail bike now so who knows where we're going to go next and i hope that we can inspire other people to follow through on their projects and their their dreams because the memories the experiences good and bad they're worth so much you can't put a dollar amount on it [Music] one more time [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Smartwool

Views: 16,523

Rating: 4.9358287 out of 5

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Id: jX4QS_65INM

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021