Wake your Karl Drais! How would he crack the problem of motorised traffic clogging city streets?

Karl Drais was the inventor of the the two-wheeled velocipede, also called Draisine or hobby horse. He was a lateral thinker always looking for ways to solve problems rather than just a mechanical tinkerer. In addition to the hobby horse he invented a device to record piano music on paper and a 16 character typewriter for use in court. As we have written before, next June will mark 200 years since he first had a hobby horse built and set off out in to the countryside near Mannheim on the best local road for a quick pint. 

Obviously the Mannheim city fathers have not ignored this anniversary, neither has the Mannheim Technoseum, the Province of Baden Württemberg's technical museum. The former are busy organising bicycle festivals and events. (Check our blog dated 25 March 2016). The latter has a major exhibition on the bike running until June next year. 

The museum has set up a quiz for school children based on the concept that the motor car is leading to collapse of mobility in cities. The question is: "What would Karl Drais invent now to stave off the death of mobility in urban areas." Participants are invited to suggest a traffic concept, an ultramodern, energy efficient vehicle or a plan for an especially cyclist-friendly city. Entries by 2 May 2017. 

I am not sure that this competition is asking the right questions. Any traffic concept would need to cut the number of motor vehicles in Mannheim whether:

• it's banning any vehicle bigger than, say a Smart car,
• a congestion charge system similar to London's, 
• banning all cars from the city centre  
• or building more protected cycleways, squeezing motor cars off the street. 

All of these are politically impossible until we get to the happy state where there are more cyclists than motorists, even then…

However, there is an energy efficient vehicle available right now. 

• It is called a bicycle or a tricycle. 
• It improves public health. 
• It is non polluting unless the engine has been eating garlicky food. 
• Its use leads to a traffic density that is higher than with the motor car. 
• It is safer. 
• Collisions between cyclists lead to fewer deaths. 


• One major disadvantage is that the cyclist is exposed to the weather. Maybe Karl Drais, a lateral thinker would be designing better waterproof but breathable clothing or an improved front fairing for a recumbent trike (See under accessories).

One way to cheaply improve the cyclist's lot in the Rhein-Neckar three province multi city metropolitan area is to link cycleways, such as they are, and quiet roads with a knooppunt or Knotenpunkt system (bicycle nodes). This system, invented by a German mining engineer, is to be found in Belgium in Flanders, the Netherlands and Germany in some areas of North Rhine Westphalia: Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düren, Heinsberg, Leverkusen, Mönchengladbach, Neuss and Viersen.

Knooppunt sign combined with traditional signposts in Hook of Holland

A visit to AVD, builder of the Windcheetah recumbent tricycle

As we reported earlier this year we visited SPEZI, the annual special bicycle exhibtion in Germersheim on Rhine - see our blog dated  26 April 2016. We chatted to a number of exhibitors and had a long conversation with Karl Sparenberg who runs Advanced Vehicle Design Ltd. (AVD). Towards the end of our discussion I asked him where he was based. He replied that I would not know the village where his workshop is based. "It's in Abbey Village." We could honestly reply that we had been through the village a number of times on our way north from Bolton, my home town which lies 10 miles away. We said that when we were in Bolton we would try to visit the workshop. In October we rang Karl and made an appointment for us both and two friends to have a look at the production workshop.
The workshop is in a former small cotton mill to the west of the main street of Abbey Village. If you wish to visit the workshop, take a mobile phone with you when you go so you can ring Karl when you arrive. The mill is used by a number of small companies as workshops and storerooms. When we were there, there was no bell and we had some difficulty making ourselves known, because we, of course, didn't have a mobile phone with us. Matters were not helped by an early autumn rain shower,
We then enjoyed a fascinating hour's discussion about castings, carbon fibre tubes, quality control and giving road men and women on on expensive bikes a surprise by passing them on hills and pulling away on a trike. We were impressed by the care the company takes both to ensure that the customer buys the correct trike for their needs and that the trikes are built to high standards. The trike frames are constructed by bonding together cast and turned connection components and tubing, either aluminium and or carbon fibre. If the last connecting piece in spite of quality control checks is shown to be faulty then the frame is junked and a new one built.
The traditional sandcasting method proved difficult to control. This frequently led to manufacturing faults in the castings. AVD moved onto the modern investment cast method with the use of wax formers which means that the frame components can be manufactured from both aluminium or magnesium depending on Windcheetah model. We suspect that three-D printing of components is on the horizon.
We would just like to stress that none of us has a financial interest in AVD nor were we offered payment to write this blog. It is unlikely that we will buy a trike either from AVD or one of the other manufacturers, worldwide. Our interest is and was in the manufacture of tricycles and bicycles. To us Karl’s ideas and skills seem to represent the best of ‘the Northern Powerhouse’ ideals, quietly working away to produce perhaps small but useful engineering marvels.

Drais Hobby Horse Races

There will be a Karl Drais Hobby Horse race around the Wasserturm in Mannheim, Germany on 11 June 2017 as part of the celebration for the 200th anniversary of the first two wheeled vehicle excursion in 1817. There will also be klapprad races on 11 June and the HPV World Championship races will be held over the weekend of 10 and 11 June.
If you wish to enter the hobby horse races contact: axel.bentz@mannheim.de. Check out: www.monnem-bike.de, www.world-Klapp.de, or www.hpv.org for more details.

Piste Cyclable / Radweg / Cycleway along the River Moselle in France November 2016

• Schengen (L)/Perl (D)/Apach (F) to Thionville: Well established well signposted route.
• Thionville to Metz: Fairly new excellent well signposted route with a link into the city centre of Metz.
• Metz to Pagny-sur-Moselle: Continuation of above route. Follow the bike signs for Woippy from cathedral square and turn off right before the canal bridge to follow the right bank. The route changes from bank to bank but is well signposted as far as Arnaville. The route follows towpaths, forest tracks and minor roads. Once you cross the departmental border into Meurthe-et-Moselle signposting and the smooth tarred path disappears. You can follow a rougher route south to Pagny-sur-Moselle where you can cross the railway lines at a level or grade crossing by pushing the button to warn the signal box of your intention or continue on along a stretch of single track path to reach the new Moselle lock and Pagny-sur-Moselle. It can take a few minutes for the rail track to be clear.
• South of Pagny-sur-Moselle: I suspect from reading the literature (http://veloroute-charles-le-temeraire.fr/etapes-veloroute-charles-le-temeraire.php) on this route that unless you are an experienced road cyclist that you would be well advised to catch a train in Pagny-sur-Moselle to Nancy. The Charles le Téméraire Cycle Route follows the D952/657 to Frouard and we did not enjoy the route as far as Pont-a-Mousson. Even on e-bikes the traffic was hairy.

We researched the route between Metz to Pagny-sur-Moselle as part of the updating of our Riesling Route guide. As the winter weather gets more unpleasant we will retire to our office to update and rewrite the book. Keep your fingers crossed.

Two hundred years of the bicycle

The first trip on two wheeled vehicle was made almost 200 years ago on 12 June 2017 by Karl Drais from the centre of Mannheim out to a pub on the road to Schwetzingen and back. The city is going to celebrate this over the next eight months. The first stage starts tomorrow with an exhibition on the history of the bicycle in the Technoseum, the provincial museum of science and technology. It runs until June next year.

Buying tickets for TER trains in Lorraine

We spent the beginning of November checking out cycle routes in the Moselle Valley in Lorraine. Rather than touring from city to city we stopped two nights in Nancy and took a train to Metz. The regional TER trains are operated by SNCF French national railways. As is usual in Europe there are two types of ticket machines on Nancy station: blue ones offering just regional TER tickets and bright yellow ones offering tickets for the whole French railways network, including the high speed TGVs. These machines speak only French, so brushez up votre Français. We found none of the ticket machines on Nancy station would accept either our German credit card or bank card. The machines do not accept notes either. We are not used to this as modern public transport ticket dispensers in Germany accept notes. We needed 14.60 € in coins which we did not have. (If I am cycling I try to carry the smallest number of coins possible to keep down the weight in my pockets.) In the end I joined a queue in the ticket office and managed to buy tickets before our train came in. We spent the day buying items separately to accumulate change. Fortunately smaller stations in France have staffed ticket offices and are often not that busy. We cycled from Metz to Pagny sur Moselle and bought tickets from a person in a ticket office.
There is another problem in buying tickets in general in la belle France. The French do not pronounce  names the way we do. It is useful when buying tickets from a ticket office to write out the name of the station you wish to reach to show the staff on the other side of the counter, because it is unlikely that they will understand your pronounciation. 
If you are buying tickets from a machine then remember that the machines although basically computers are very exact but dumb. Sensibly the TER ticket machines offer a list of major destinations in the region. If you want to travel to a small village you need to key in the first letter of the first name not the first letter of the second name in the case of a station with a double barreled name. We wanted to go  to a village called Avricourt. Its station lies between Avricourt and Igney and so the station is called Igney-Avricourt. It took a while for us to find it. Vive la France!

Accompanied bicycles on TER trains in France

We went by train today with our touring bikes from Wissembourg, Alsace to Nancy, Lorraine via Strasbourg. What we learned was

• If you use Voyage-SNCF.com or trainline EU to book your tickets for train trips in France and you use the option to pick the tickets up at a French station, be prepared to wait in a queue if you don't use a ticket dispenser to get your tickets. The larger stations have long queues to buy tickets.  Even some of the smaller stations with staff can be difficult. The Gare de Wissembourg employs bilingual French and German speaking staff. It is used quite extensively by Germans from the South West to book complicated journeys in France and this can take time, as I found today.
• You can get all your tickets at once not only for the station you are at. Once you've got your ticket/s do not forget to "composter" -stamp- your tickets in the yellow pod devices by the entrance to the platforms, before you get on your train. Otherwise the ticket collector can fine you  40 or so Euro for an "un-composted" ticket. 
• It is a good idea to take a bungee or two to secure your bike/s, because some of the older TER coaching stock bounces around the curves. You can hang your steed up, but this appears not to be de rigeur on the older trains. If you are going to hang up your bike then do when the train in standing still, don't wait for it to move. It starts jumping about like a bucking bronco.

Edinburgh Waverley Station Bike Facilities - Watch out Copenhagen

We are both British but have lived abroad for 30 and 40 years. We have not travelled with a bicycle on a British train since privatisation. From what we read the railways in Britain do not appear to be very cyclist friendly. We read stories of British long-distance trains that take a maximum of two bicycles, so if a family of four want to take their bicycles on holiday, they need to travel on two separate trains. However we were pleasantly surprised recently on Edinburgh's Waverley Station. We wanted to take the recently reopened Borders Railway to Tweedbank. As we waited for the train I noticed a pillar on the platform. On closer inspection I noticed a number of tools, a bicycle pump and a rack to hang a bike from to ease working on it. Network Rail, the public organisation responsible for stations and track paid for this. This platform seems to offer better facililties than any Danish, Dutch or Swiss railway station we have visited.

However the warning that one should lock both front and back wheels does not bode well for bike security.

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.

Bicycle expressways in and around Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen and Mannheim

The German Fedral Government plans to invest in new cycle freeways. These will be designed to take bicycles and e-bikes with a maximum speed of about 19mph, which means no pedestrians crossing the road, no junctions and lighting when dark. These routes are not designed for day rambles out into the country, but for commuters. The Mannheim region is planning to apply for financing for several routes:

East West: Heidelberg Mannheim Ludwigshafen and farther west in to Rhineland Palatinate.
A vaguely North South route from Mannheim to Darmstadt.
A southern route towards Karlsruhe.

I am a little dubious about the design speeds. It does not sound like much fun to ride for the slow moving like Judith and I. I just just hope I can see them before I have to hand in my bicycle clips for ever.

Kalmit Klapprad 2016

We went to the annual Kalmit Klapprad meeting for the first time in 5 years on September 3rd. Quite why we've missed it in between we don't know. For those that don't read this blog the Kalmit Cup is a Klapprad bicycle race up hill to Kalmit hill (400m climb over 6km) from Maikammer a village on the edge of the Rhine Plain in the south of Rhineland Palatinate. A klapprad is a pre Brompton folding bike, maybe sitting dusty and unloved at the back of the garage. We travelled there by train with our Bromptons (5 and 10 gear models) and followed two race participants on single gear Klapprads from the railway station to climb about 100m to reach the starting line. They disappeared up the road as if I was standing still and I was half dead by the time I reached the line.
It is a serious race. The winner (male) took just over 19 minutes to reach the top. The fastest signora took somewhat over 24 minutes. However there are also prizes for the best costumes. The theme this year was Italy, so we spectators were treated to a cycling leaning Tower of Pisa, Roman Centurians, pizza delivery vans, Chianti bottles, ice cream cones and, of course, the Mafia. All good fun. This year the requirement that the riders have a mustache was dropped, but registration was only possible if the rider could give their start number in Italian!

Anyone for pizza?

Pizza trike followed by 2 gondolas

"Ben Hur" meets ""Death in Venice"

Bellisimo! The essence of Italy, the flag, the Romans, Pisa, Chianti, the Mafia

Packing for touring

We have just spent a few days touring along the Kocher-Jagst Cycle Route on the edge of the Swabian Alb and saw a modest number of other touring cyclists. What struck us was the amount of baggage carried by some groups with in some cases trailers. If you are camping then you do need a lage amount of gear, but over the years we have gradually reduced the amount of stuff we take with us to one set of evening gear, a spare set of cycling gear, not forgetting waterproofs, maps, guides, water bottles/s, something to read in the evening, a first aid kit and enough tools to repair a puncture as well as a spare inner tube all packed in waterproof bags - think Ortlieb. That's about it. That's all you need.
Don't forget though that if your bags are so tightly are so tightly packed that there is no room for anything like a lunchtime snack this could lead to problems. If you leave home in wet weather it is possible to forget that you will need somewhere to pack your wet weather gear when the sun shines. It is easy to do. I have done it and ended up buying a new rack pack on the next day to take my jacket and overtrousers.

Finding a room when touring in Germany

A few thoughts on the matter:
Firstly when planning your route either aim to book rooms or if you are travelling without booking then make sure that you are going to stop overnight in communities that have more than one organisation offering accommodation. This might mean that you have the odd shorter day, but this is better than spending the night in a bus shelter or having to cycle on or back for another 10 or 15km after a 100km day.
Secondly if you are using the compromise system whereby you book a hotel by phone at lunchtime, it is worthwhile checking how the accommodation looks on its website. If you don't, you could well have a surprise when you arrive.
Thirdly do not forget that you need to eat in the evening. If the accommodation lies a few kilometres from the next community and does not offer evening meals, you might well have a long walk or ride to get your evening meal.
Fourthly we have started to use booking websites, because one can book online, but be observant, these sites run on the assumption that one is travelling by car so a distance of 20km can be assumed to be nearby. The sites often only list a part of the accommodation available, so it is worth looking at other booking sites or even the hotel website itself as more and more are offering online bookings.

Bicycles in the Stoewer Museum in Wald-Michaelbach

Stoewer was a small motor manufacturer in Stettin (now Szczecin in Western Poland). The company is best known for its technically advanced cars. However it also built sewing machines, typewriters and bicycles. Examples of all these can be seen in the Stoewer-Museum, Michelstraße 1, Wald-Michelbach, Hesse, Germany. The museum is only open between 2 and 5 pm on the first Sunday of each month. Wald-Michelbach can be easily reached by car or by bus from Weinheim, Bergstraße. More information is available under www.stoewer-museum.de .