Roads to Quoz

by William Least Heat-Moon

  The safety record in proper railbiking is strong enough for proponents to offer it to the blind who ride in four-wheeled machines (as with a locomotive, the tracks do the steering). And Dick, using a side-by-side tandem model and turning the pedals, had taken a paraplegic friend on outings. (Another paraplegic, a machinist, helped make parts for one experimental Railcycle.) The mother of a child with cerebral palsy, after a ride in the East, told a maker of four-wheeled cycles, “That’s the only way my daughter can ride a ‘bicycle.’ If those corporate presidents and their lawyers knew what it means to a child to experience something the rest of us take for granted, maybe they’d rethink the issue. Riding a bike is an American rite of passage.”

  Smart said, “In this country, abandoned and dormant tracks are a huge resource we’ve never really realized or utilized. Right in front of us are thousands of miles of linear parks. The infrastructure is already there, and so is the need.” (Pogo, of the great Okefenokee: “We stand here confronted by insurmountable opportunities.”)

  In 1999, the London Underground, Bakerloo line, bought eight heavy-duty Railcycles Smart designed for track inspectors and maintenance crews to use during off-service hours. Twenty years after his initial experimental model, he figured the way at last had opened, but when we met him in Orofino, the Underground experiment seemed to have withered. He guessed the problem was a guidance system not then perfected and the requirement of several “weird English safety features” making the cycles somewhat heavy and unwieldy. Nevertheless, he’d heard that following a terrorist attack in the London Underground, the bikes had been put to good advantage.

  After a quarter of a century, he gave up making Railcycles to sell, concentrating instead on machines for only himself and friends. At the time we were headed toward the Camas Prairie line, he was working on a lightweight, collapsible model that would fit into a suitcase he could put on a train bound for the end of steel — say, in Bolivia or on the Old Patagonian Express where sidetracks are abundant and unencumbered by corporate self-interest masked with persiflage blaming litigious Americans.

  “I decided I’d pushed the business of making Railcycles as far as I wanted. In twenty-five years, I built fifteen bicycles for myself or friends or family, and I built another forty to sell. Even though I’ve never heard of a railbike-train accident, I got tired of worrying where people might ride my Railcycles.” He was speaking slowly. “I came to see it was rich, older men who bought the bikes, and most of those guys didn’t have much time to ride. The people with good opportunities to go out and explore the nooks and crannies couldn’t afford a Railcycle.”

  It was discouraging for him to say that. “I made very little money from sales, but while it lasted, it was an energizing dream. But, to tell the truth, after nearly thirty years, I began to feel imprisoned by the whole concept. So I simplified my passion. When I retire next year, I just want to enjoy biking the rails. Enjoy it while I can. While the old tracks remain, I’d like to ride more than my usual thousand miles a year.”

  7

  Railroad on Stilts

  THE 1902 SEARS, ROEBUCK CATALOG offered for $8.50 an outrigger “railroad attachment” that could transform an ordinary bicycle into one capable of riding the tracks; the description claimed, “We have found this device to be very popular with railroad and telegraph men, particularly in the West, although it is adapted for use by anyone, and the parts will fit a lady’s bicycle as readily as a man’s bicycle.” The attachment was essentially similar to all successful later conversion devices, and (like Smart’s renditions) it could be removed to allow the bike to travel “on the wagon roads.” No railbike, apparently, has ever succeeded without employing an outrigger — not a surprising result since the width of the top of a standard-gauge rail varies only from two-and-a-half to three inches, the surface both slightly convex and often canted. Riding a full-sized bicycle atop a rail raised four to six inches above the ties gives a rider a near sensation of being a cyclist on a circus wire.

  Saturday came on sunny — rain-slicked tracks would have canceled our plans — and Q and I headed out with Smart and Wright, a pair of names to give confidence as we drove up into the mountains toward an isolated and abandoned stretch of the Camas Prairie Railroad (the prairie lay elsewhere). We were at the base of the Idaho Panhandle, on the edge, as it were, of the skillet. The Orofino Creek section of the CPR, built in 1928, was the “Railroad on Stilts,” its nickname deriving from an original fifty-nine bridges in its forty-mile length; nearly all those wooden trestles remained, and they were the reason Dick had asked earlier if I was afraid of heights. The night before our ride, he lent me an illustrated history of the CPR, and in the book was a photograph of a big locomotive on its side below a trestle. If a dozen heavy wheels can careen off into Orofino Creek, thought I, then what about a mere two, each weighing about the same as my skull?

  Never more than a logging railroad, the Headquarters branch of the line carried no passengers other than timbermen, a sad circumstance given the beauty of the terrain it penetrated. Several miles west of the erstwhile gold-mining town of Pierce and about fifty miles from the spine of the Bitterroots to the east, we rumbled down a rough rock-road to the rusted tracks, where we assembled outriggers to four Railcycles, the models slightly different and each once experimental.

  Between the tracks grew ferns and daisies and also a few conifer seedlings that all too quickly would rise to obstruct passage, although nothing then was big enough to require cutting. Dick rubbed his shoe over a rusted rail and said, “We’ll have good traction.” I was happy to hear that, even more so because of my concern having to do not with traction but with impaction and compaction: bikes, riders, locomotives. Q popped out with a faux Confucianism: “He who rides rail with shine, soon makes headline.” After a moment I answered, If rail gleams, I’ll listen for your screams.

  Although the tracks had been in place almost three-quarters of a century, the rails themselves were a hundred-years old (every length of steel carries the date and place of manufacture), and that meant they were low (good news to a novice) as well as narrow (not so good); another way to express riding old rails is to say derailments are usually more frequent but less consequential in outcome. Nonetheless, a front wheel falling off a six-inch-high rail (if the rock ballast reaches the tops of the ties) is like hitting a half-foot-deep pothole in a street, and that’s why to railbike is to sooner or later make a trip over the handlebars, one’s cranium leading the way. Such somersaults can also come from braking too fast; from steel encumbered by debris or slicked by rain, frost, or cow pies; or from failing to notice damaged tracks. The worst injury Smart had witnessed happened when a rider did not see a spike a vandal had pounded between a gap in adjoining rails. The good doctor bandaged up his friend’s cut head with what was at hand (a clean diaper), and on they rode. (He once bound up another noggin with a spare inner tube.) His own most serious somersault left him with a cracked eye socket that didn’t keep him from continuing, even though he was, as usual, far from assistance. “For the first twenty years,” he said, “I didn’t wear a helmet. I hope you remembered yours.” Q and I looked at each other. “Well then,” he said, “try to stay on your bike.”

  Richard Smart’s innovations to the guidance device in front of the forward wheel were sophisticated enough to have earned a patent: the current Railcycles employed magnets — made of rare earth and strong enough to lift two-hundred pounds — to keep in place the guide wheel which in turn kept the front wheel atop the rail; under an experienced rider, the rear wheel followed along like an obedient dog on a leash. The outrigger and its roller held the bike upright, and in Smart’s ingenious system its height could be adjusted to prevent the cycle on banked curves from leaning too far to one side and derailing. The leveler knob, back of the seat, necessitated a rider reaching behind to adjust it, and learning the optimum degree of incline required experience. Twisting the knob beyond what was needed would assure the bike of falling off the rail to land either between
the tracks or, more disturbingly, outside them. No chalkboard instruction here: you learned to avoid derailing by derailing.

  Because of the low friction between tires and tracks, railbiking is often a hands-free coasting or effortless pedaling through forest or countryside at eight miles an hour, although a veteran rider on well-laid track can do safely more than twice that. A cyclist who neglects to lock the brakes after dismounting and steps away for a moment may turn around to see the bike, quite on its own, heading for the next county.

  Except when passing through track switches, a Railcycle did not really need to be steered, and the gentle gradients necessary for heavy trains meant a single gear-ratio could serve, leaving hands free to fiddle with the leveler knob, take photographs, point out bovine-beshat rails, or make the sign of the Cross.

  There was one additional variable to be reckoned with: the standard American measure between rail centers is 56½ inches, but that distance varies (the source of sway a coach passenger feels) because of shoddy track construction, poor maintenance, or an expansion or contraction of steel caused by changing temperature. Such variations increase chances for derailments, and for those reasons mastering a railbike was more difficult than riding a street bike.

  We set off, going down the grade first, with Doc on point and the Prof at the rear and Q behind me so I could serve as an early-warning device for the neophyte. Dick called out, “We’re going to gain speed! Avoid braking hard!”

  A year earlier Q and I had biked the old towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland, an almost two-hundred-mile run from the Appalachian front at Cumberland down to virtual sea level at Georgetown. Failing to remember that between locks, a canal consists of pools — level water — I expected an easy coasting down to Washington, but the whole way was dedicated pedaling over rock surfaces of various finish, some requiring us to walk the bicycles. A week later, my thighs were almost capable of leaping a small bike in a single bound. On the Camas Prairie line, which rises from 925 feet at Orofino to 3,521 feet near the eastern terminus, I’d prepared my mind for serious exertion on a machine thirty pounds heavier than my lightweight bike at home.

  Holding the Railcycle down onto the rail as I mounted up — a preposition not to be ignored when balancing almost four feet above the ballast — I released the brake, and without a single turn of the pedals I began rolling along, although the trackway looked level, and within a minute I was slipping into a speed probably beyond my facility to handle. From behind I heard Ken say, “Is it like riding on glass?” Never having ridden on glass in any sort of vehicle, I agreed it was, all the while thinking how comforting would feel a touch of bituminous friction. My memory, either to taunt or warn, kept flashing that photograph of the giant locomotive on its side down in Orofino Creek, a stream then with more boulders than water.

  Only a hundred yards from our start was the first trestle — not one of the little, straight and quaint ones but a long and curving and banked monster sixty feet above the rocks, and on it was not an inch of guardrailing. Elevated steel on an elevated railroad. Well, Stanley, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into.

  I began adjusting my leveler to match the canted tracks, giving it an extra turn or two to make sure a derailment would toss me not over the edge but to the centerline of the bridge, and that’s just what it did. I managed to land on my feet on the ties — those blessed ties — but I let slip a loud utterance more blasphemous than prudent, should it prove to be one’s last words.

  In my head was this: if I’d nearly gone over the side of a trestle in the first three minutes, what did the rest of the day hold? Q rode up and calmly asked, “What happened?” I explained with further graphic embellishment. Here was a fellow who once was going to bike three-thousand miles of trackage across America, a plan as feasible as his earlier one to bicycle from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. No guts, no story — sometimes better rendered as no brains, no story.

  On foot, Dick came back across the bridge to check on the situation. “Overcorrected?” he said. Then, gently, “A lot of beginners aren’t ashamed to walk the bike over trestles.” It’s nothing, I lied. Dick said, “The first time I rode my first Railcycle, I didn’t make it more than a hundred feet.” Were you on a trestle? “No, but the early bikes were even harder to get the hang of.”

  I set the cycle again atop the tracks, and just before we rolled on, Dick added, “It’s good that happened early so you can see derailing isn’t all that bad.” (He was out of earshot when I mumbled that going over the edge of a six-storey building seemed to me a little bad.)

  We continued, I making a mental note to remind Honored Reader that western Kansas is a good place to learn railbiking. Then another long, curving, banking, high trestle, and again came an overcorrection of the leveler, followed once more by a blurt of billingsgate. (The phrase “straight as a rail” may describe a fence but it surely doesn’t fit the Camas Prairie tracks through the Clearwater Mountains.) Q, rolling up calmly if not cocksurely, commented, “Did it again?” I vowed, on the next trestle, I would kiss the boulders before giving that damned knob one cautious turn too many.

  Doc, ever solicitous, came back again, and I asked him how Q was able to stay atop the steel. “She’s on a London Underground model,” he said. “It’s heavier and more stable.” Q volunteered to switch machines. As have we all, I’ve met a few people I’d gladly have swapped bikes with as a public service (not all of them legislators), but to put Q on my wheels of death — now, that would have been wrong.

  Forward once more to another set of stilts, but that time I made a successful if uneasy crossing. Between the trestles, I was enjoying the silent rolling through the national forest; the movement was that in a dream where gravity doesn’t exist.

  To reduce apprehension and enhance the ride further, on the next trestle I forced myself to lift my arms from the handlebars and coast across (the old stratagem — Do what you fear), and Q, who had not seen the photograph of the fallen locomotive, did likewise but with bravado, as if she were on a boulevard. (The retentive reader will recall she once practiced flying with her mother’s kitchen-broom.)

  Where the tracks entered a deep rock cut high above the creek, we stopped and unpacked lunch from a tiny single-wheel trailer Dick towed behind his cycle. I got my camera from a backpack tied to the poles of my outrigger which served as both counterbalance and a means to get the burden of camping gear off one’s spine.

  While we ate sandwiches, I mentioned the news article I’d seen in 1975 and the washing-machine motors propelling those railbikes, and Dick said, “Sooner or later, everyone we meet asks why I don’t put a motor on a Railcycle, and I explain how engines would destroy the serenity we go into the backcountry to find.” Ken said, “Anyone who doesn’t mind motors and uproar and fumes would be happier in a speeder club.” Speeders are small four-wheeled vehicles with gasoline engines once used by track crews; they’re a motorized version of a handcar. (Today it’s more usual for crews to ride in “high railers,” a pickup with an undercarriage allowing it to clip along atop the steel.)

  In the United States, there were some seven-hundred speeders and a couple-of-dozen railbikers. Happily for the HPV corps, speeders require a well-maintained line where the heavy, cumbersome machines have assured passage. A Railcycle can go wherever a bicycle can go, but a speeder travels only where a locomotive can. Ken said, “In a speeder, you might as well be in a car with a bad muffler.”

  “On one trip,” Dick said, “we came upon apples hanging right over the tracks, so we picked a few on the fly. Never got off the bikes. Experiences like that — that’s what we hope to find. And wildlife. I’ve encountered wolves, cougars, black bears, weasels, badgers, marmots, skunks, elk, deer, beaver, moose, coyotes, mustangs. I can’t recall all of them.”

  On tracks not completely abandoned, Doc and the Prof had also occasionally encountered trainmen and laborers. “They’re curious about a Railcycle and some even want to give it a try,” Wright said. “The
y don’t have any interest in running us off. That comes from a corporate office, the leaders, guys who haven’t set foot between the rails in years, if ever.”

  When he and Smart rode a seldom-used or closed-on-Sunday line, they reported any track damage they saw, picked up litter, and considered themselves not threats or impediments to the rail industry but contributors. Yet getting permission to ride any route was difficult. “Even on defunct lines with bridges out and telegraph poles fallen across the rails, lines where no train could run anymore,” Ken said, “we’ve been denied permission by somebody eight-hundred miles away who’s never seen the tracks we’re talking about. To tell you the truth, on lines like that, it’s easier to seek forgiveness than seek permission. After all, we know better than anyone else you’d be crazy to ride live steel.”

  I said that the federal government granted railroads most of the land their trains run on, especially in the West, and when that ground is abandoned or used only seasonally — as on an agricultural short line moving a wheat harvest — it ought to be open other times to the public granting the right-of-way. Railbanking, the preservation of defunct rail corridors for possible later use, is a sound economic idea, especially in a nation already in need of increased efficiency in transporting things and people, and steel-on-steel is as efficient as transport gets. To surrender shuttered rail-corridors or tear out infrastructure is manifestly shortsighted.

  If Smart had a million dollars, he didn’t think he could improve his Railcycle except to make it smaller, lighter, and more portable. How about putting the leveler, I said, up where I can see it? He smiled. “Ken and I have been over the handlebars more times than we can remember. Riding two wheels of any kind means you’re going to eat dust now and then. Ken even did it once off a trestle. Not a high one, but still a trestle.”