If you take the wheels off a FIAT Punto, you might just notice that those rims fit nicely on a rail. [AT Lab] did, and the resulting build makes for a very watchable video.
Some of us have been known to spend a little too much time chasing trains, and there’s little on rails that won’t catch a railfan’s eye. That goes for rail speeders too, home constructed railcarts for exploring abandoned lines, and there are some great builds out there. We like the one in the video below the break, but we can’t help noticing a flaw which might just curtail its career.
It’s a simple enough build, a wooden chassis, a single motor and chain drive to one axle. All the wheel fittings are 3D printed, which might be a case of using the one tool you have to do everything, but seems to work. It rides well on the test track which appears to be an abandoned industrial siding, but it’s in those wheels we can see the problem and we guess that perhaps the builder is not familiar with rails. The Punto wheels have an inner rim and an outer rim, while a true rail wheel only has an inner one. There’s a good reason for this; real railways have points and other trackwork, not to mention recessed rails at road crossings or the like. We love the cart, but we’d cut those inner rims off to avoid painful derailments.
If you’re up for the ultimate railway build, take care not to go near a live line, and make sure you follow this video series.
“but we’d cut those inner rims off to avoid painful derailments.” I think you meant to say that you’d cut the outer rims off, not the inner ones.
it’s the inner rims of the wheel, but they are mounted in reverse here… but yeah, it’s not at all clear :)
I think I’m confused about how that FIAT wheel works. If you remove the wheels, aren’t the rims a part of what you removed?
“one tool you have to do everything”
“it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument
‘When your only tool is a hammer, all the world starts to look like a skull!’
The wear parts are the car wheels.
Tops of rails are hardened.
No need to cut the outer part of the rim off.
It will fall off on it’s own, in a hundred miles or so.
More or less, the same punchline as the ‘Asian clap’ joke.
Something about not needing roads and trying to get the thing up to 88Mph.
This is one of those 10/10 bad ideas. I love it!
the only thing wrong with this build is a lack of a shovel holder. you kind of need one to dig out of situations where abandoned rails have accumulated a surplus of dirt. abandoned rails tend to be abandoned for a reason.
ahhhh… but what if there’s another person on a similar contraption but coming from the opposite direction, moving at high speed and also assuming the tracks are abandoned?