SPEZI Special Bike Show 2019

SPEZI, the annual Special Bike Show held in the last weekend in April is the world's largest show for recumbents, recumbent tricycles, quadracycles, folding cycles, tandems, family cycles, velomobiles, transporters, electrical bikes, special needs bikes, adult kick scooters, child and load trailers, customised designs and accessories (www.specialbikesshow.com). Fortunately for us it is held in Germersheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany about an hour and a half away from home by tram and train. We visited the show for many of the 24 years it has been held including this year.
We always make a point of visiting the Junik-hpv stand (www.junik-hpv.de). This year two items caught our eye: a modified Brompton designed to be ridden by midgets: the Bromptolino 
and a Brompton equipped with a Velospeeder (http://www.velogical-engineering.com/), a friction e-drive that can be used for short periods when support is needed.

The Bromptolino

A few yards away in Hall 2 (or should we write metres) we visited the Sporthopeo stand (www.sporthopeo.fr) offering what could well be a lifesaver for cyclists who due to illness or accident can no longer keep their feet on the pedals. It’s basically a pair of magnets that can be strapped on bicycle or even tricycle pedals to secure the feet to the pedal. A twist of the feet will free the legs in case of need. The system offers more ease of use than conventional click pedals which take some getting used to, in my opinion even on a trike where you are not trying to balance and pedal at the same time.

We popped on to the Voss Stand (German Brompton distributors) and tried to talk a possible customer in to buying a Brompton. Our argument was that the bikes may be expensive but well made. We have had ours for twenty years. We have cycled over the Alps on them and they are in good shape. (I wish I was in such good shape.) One of these days I suspect I will apply to Brompton to pay us a premium😎.
We are seriously interested in buying two trikes. One of my concerns about buying a trike is getting the thing on a train. I know I am going to buy it to cycle and not to take it for trips on the railways, but we would like to travel slightly farther away from home and want to travel fairly quickly without using a car. I popped on to the Hase stand and asked about  the company’s Lepus trike which has been offered in a folding version since 2016. The employee I talked to suggested that folded trikes could be put on DB German Railways regional trains but not on long distance trains. He also said there could be problems with Jobsworths - employees who would love to help you “…but it it’s more than my job’s worth”. The Hase employee had a cargo bike and found it was possible to travel by train with this bike, but from time to time he’d had problems. This was a honest answer.
Our next conversation was with an employee on the HPVelotechnik stand. Delivery times for the Gekko models is about 8 weeks at the moment. This is good news for HPVelotechnik, but it means we will have to wait when we get round to buying a trike.
We were amused to see a further advantage of a recumbent trike on the TRAIX stand (German distributors of KMX trikes): If the self service restaurant is full, take your dinner back to the trike and use the trike as an armchair:

I found the velo spring sprung handlebar grips which are made of nut tree wood an interesting concept (www.velospring.com). Judith was less impressed. Old rubber grips after two or three years use are not things of beauty. These polished walnut grips which are internally sprung will stay good-looking for longer.
There is definitely a lot of interest in e-cargo-bikes and -trikes in view of inner city congestion, lack of car parking spaces and restrictions on diesel and petrol engined vehicles causing air pollution .

Radkutsche Musketier (www.radkutsche.de) - one of many cargo bikes on show.

It could be that growing provision of high speed cycle routes has yielded dividends for the sales of velomobikes - cycle cars - enclosed body work for trike or quad bikes. The ecVelo Challenger (https://www.eurocircuits.com/ec-velo/challenger/) with its rather neat body work on an AZUB TriCon trike caught our eye:

A good looking velomobile

One matter that was of interest was the fact that our local regional paper the Mannheimer Morgen finally noticed after well over 20 or so years that a major cycle event had happened in the area. Unfortunately another velomobile worth 16 000€ was stolen from outside a pub in Germersheim early on Monday morning after the event.

The stolen green velomobile

This theft was reported in the Mannheimer Morgen. I suspect the problem is that the Mannheimer Maimarket, a regional ideal home consumer show starts on the same day as SPEZI, and there is little desire on the part of the Mannheim paper to suggest visitors should attend an event other than the Maimarkt.

New Deutsche Bahn High Speed Trains

Amazing! Deutsche Bahn German Railways has fought against putting bicycles on ICEs, their high speed flagship trains since they were first introduced more than 20 years ago.  The fat controllers have changed their minds in a big way. The latest class, the ICE4, will take at least 8 bikes, probably in summer. It is a miracle. I hope that we can use them when the trains come into service in late 2017.

Common sense triumphs, amazing!

It appears to be believed in the upper floors of some railway administrations that as soon as bicycles need to be loaded on and off high speed trains there will be delays and the loss of five or six seats that are replaced by a bicycle compartment will ruin the economics of the trains. On Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish high speed trains bicycles except folders and bagged bikes are verboten. Common sense says that this belief is rubbish. Nobody bans mothers with prams or three children because they find it difficult to get on and off trains or they need room to put their Kinderwagen somewhere. Some of the French TGVs on the newer routes from Paris Gare de l'Est, for example take 8 bikes per train and seem to run profitably and punctually.
Not very often, but occasionally I am amazed that a common sense approach to demands from the travelling public has been taken by the Fat Controllers of railway organisations. Recently the ÖBB, Austrian railways announced that all 51 of their premium railjet trains will modified to include a compartment to take 6 bicycles with plugs allowing e-bike charging while underway. This work will be finished in 2013. More information can be found on http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b0c3ff3f53e4c6a8be5677245&id=def475c28e.
On the other hand, the new generation of German IC/EC trains, the ICx will offer 8 bike places, less than the dozen or so on offer at the moment. This model will also form the basis of the replacement ICE1 and ICE2 stock by the end of the decade. It could be possible to offer high speed transport for bicycles, but don't hold your breath. I have the feeling that the Fat Controllers believe that only "suits" with brief cases are the proper class of people to travel on ICEs.

Bicycle space on an IC at present.

A winter excursion to Copenhagen Part I

Deutsche Bahn (DB) German Railways offer BahnCards - a range of reduced price cards giving substantial discounts on travel. One of the side benefits of buying a card is that you are offered a cheap trip to a specific destination from time to time. Recently we were offered a trip to Copenhagen and decided since this is probably the most cyclist-friendly city in the world, it would be a good place to exercise our Bromptons. In addition because we would be travelling on ICEs, we could check out the ease of travel with a folding bicycle on German high speed trains.

We took the midmorning ICE from Mannheim to Hamburg via Hanover which takes about four and a half hours to reach Hamburg. We had two seats in the middle of the open plan section of the first or second generation stock which was ideal, near to the luggage stand and with room between the seats to slip in a Brompton. We had 50 minutes or so to change trains in Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, but were rather surprised to see a very short ICE-TD with just four carriages arrive to take us to Copenhagen. Normally ICEs are nine or ten carriages long. However anything longer than four carriages would not fit on the ferry. Again the train was full, but there was room enough between seats to store the bikes. If we had needed we could stored them on luggage racks in the middle of the train.

The run from Hamburg to the German ferry port at Puttgarden is pleasant enough through Holstein. Passengers must leave the train once it arrives on the ship. The trip on ship was not so exciting. It was a pitch black November night and so we did not see anything. The ship's journey takes 45 minutes which is just enough time to eat a moderately expensive snack, or hit the duty free shop to buy chocolate, beer and spirits. Our Danish train conductor announced that due to urgent bridge repairs that we would transfer to a bus to Copenhagen in Nykobing. This went well and there was no problem popping the bikes and our bags in the lockers under the bus.

We arrived at the central station Københavns Hovedbanegård at about 20:30 on cold windy pitch night. The cycling facilities in Copenhagen are mind boggling, e.g. wide physically separate cycleways and green wave traffic lights for cyclists. We suspect that any British, American or even German cyclist cycling around Copenhagen would think they had popped their clogs and gone to heaven. However we are from the North of England, so any chance to complain should be taken: There are no town plans on display in the station and thus no cycle routes on display. We needed to go the south of the city to the Amager Youth Hostel. Fortunately drawing on many years of carrying out research for our cycle touring guide books, we had a city plan tucked in the back of a guide book and had googled and printed out the approach to the Youth Hostel. We peered out of various entrances, managed to orientate ourselves with the help of the lights of the Tivoli pleasure gardens and studied our maps. We worked out our route and moved out. It was Saturday night. Road traffic was fairly heavy. There are few signposts for cyclists, but we had no trouble getting out of the centre and across the Langebro bridge over the harbour canal. We turned off into a area of tenements still on a cycle track and then got lost. In the ensuing efforts to find our way we lost the guide book, but not the map. Finally we found our way past the university campus to the hostel.