I haven’t been doing any entries to this blog because of a lot of ToDos that keep coming up. Maybe if I just liked model railroads, there wouldn’t be a problem. But there are these neat old cars I own, and a few other distractions. I needed to get a few things done, so I decided to join another club, the Nor Coast Rodders Car CLub. They liked old cars and I thought it might motivate me to get some of my cars running. Well, one of the guys in that club, Steve Wells, has a speeder which is a vehicle that runs on railroad tracks. That seemed like a good mix to me.
I have seen several speeders, some that the CWR uses, and there is always the races at the Kinetic Carnivale every year in Willits, CA. So, I had to go see them. The Kinetic Carnival encourages and rewards individual creative efforts, so a motorized speeder like Steve’s was not what they wanted to see. The races were between vehicles that rode on RR tracks but were pedaled like a bike. Here are some pictures of those vehicles. The first is the only “close race” that occurred (many of the creations didn’t get too far done the track before collapsing).
I liked the two persons pedaling the one in front. The umbrella was a nice touch and was actually useful that day (very hot!!). The next picture shows the fastest one which had an large pineapple on the back. Anyone they raced never got close enough to be in the same picture at the finish!
You might ask why there weren’t any hand cars (as originally used) and I found out that very few of those were around anymore. The ones that actually were rebuilt went to Burning Man instead of coming to Willits. You can think about why Burning Man in hot and dusty Nevada was a better place to go than Willits.