Draisine

A draisine (dreɪˈziːn) is a light auxiliary rail vehicle, driven by service personnel or own user, equipped to transport crew and material necessary for the maintenance of railway infrastructure. This includes leisure, driven by the own user, in a safe way (i.e. not inclined planes). The eponymous term is derived from the German inventor Baron Karl Drais, who invented his Laufmaschine (German for "running machine") in 1817, which was called Draisine in German (vélocipède or draisienne in French) by the press. It is the first reliable claim for a practically used precursor to the bicycle, basically the first commercially successful two-wheeled, steerable, human-propelled machine, nicknamed hobby-horse or dandy horse. Later, the name draisine came to be applied only to the invention used on rails and was extended to similar vehicles, even when not human-powered. Because of their low weight and small size, they can be put on and taken off the rails at any place, allowing trains to pass. In the United States, motor-powered draisines are known as speeders while human-powered ones are referred as handcars. Vehicles that can be driven on both the highway and the rail line are called road–rail vehicles, or (after a trademark) Hy-Rails. "Draisines", called dressin in Swedish, dresin in Norwegian, dræsine in Danish, and resiina in Finnish, refers to pedal-powered rail-cycles which were used by railroad maintenance workers in Finland, Sweden, and Norway until about 1950, as handcars were elsewhere. Draisines nowadays are used for recreation on several unused railway lines in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Poland, some other European countries and South Korea. Several companies rent draisines in Sweden. In the United States, railbike tours have operated in several states nationwide: California, Maine, Oregon, the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and Delaware. Until 2007, Finland hosted an annual competition, Resiina-ralli (Draisine Rally), involving several draisine teams travelling for many days on the railways from one corner of the country to another.