Summary
The US has tons of abandoned rail, especially in urban environments, so it seems a shame to let it go to waste. [OneWheel] decided to modify one of their boards to ride the rail behind their office. The stock OneWheel frame was sectioned and CNC cut mounts were placed in the center to raise the motor above the deck. Steel rail wheels sourced from eBay were then attached to an axle run through where the original wheel was mounted in the center. The motor housing was turned down on a lathe for better clearance, and then a bike sprocket was attached to chain drive the train axle. While not everyone has a hydraulic press and a CNC for that professional look, we don’t see any reason you couldn’t bodge something similar together at home. Be sure to watch [Bradley Gawthrop]’s Supercon talk on the Personal Electric Vehicle Revolution for some ideas on what you need to get started. Dream of riding the rails yourself? You should checkout this tiny rail riding pod car or this more minimalist example. Definitely make sure you’re riding on a truly abandoned line or get a rail warrant though! While railroad may seems abandoned, it is still technically trespassing if you don’t check first. Find out who owns the railroad and verify it is not in use, then get permission to travel on the track for recreational purpose. Is it still a “onewheel” if it has more than one wheel? That’s where my thoughts went. Wouldn’t it technically be a bicycle bow? Of course Bodhi is the first to ride it. Only he could just jump on such an insane thing and have it work like magic. Seems like it would be easy for it to rotate a little on the yaw axis and fall off the rails unless you get the tolerances between the two wheel rims just right, and falling would suck really bad. But that’s half the fun with boardsports Indeed, it seems that this would happen if you went around a long enough curved section of track. It could use some kind of differential action that you could control to get the wheel that’s ahead slowed down a bit so the lagging one can catch up. Bonus points if this is done automatically. I’m vaguely remembering how this works for actual trains. I believe the beveled shape of the wheel makes for a larger radius on the outside of a curve and a smaller radius on the inside, providing some differential action. So getting the geometry right is important. Yes. The inertia of the train, on a curve, drives the wheel to the flange on the outside wheel where the diameter is largest . Yep, trains don’t need differentials because they bank in the turn and the wheels are conical, so the circumference on the outside vs the inside increases proportional to the tightness of the turn. Very clever. However, train cars have four wheels so they can’t just rotate 90 degrees and fall off the rails into the space between them The wheel flange, if tight to both rails, likely stops any rotation like that… So long as the tracks are parallel. This actually will not happen if the two wheels are rigidly connected and both wheels have a taper. Its fundamental to how trains stay on the rails. https://www.reddit.com/r/mechanical_gifs/comments/889ggu/why_train_wheels_have_conical_geometry/ It’s two wheels and a railcart is by definition self-balancing because of running on rails. If you insist on riding standing up, how about One Rail Two Wheels?