Cycling For Dummies--UK by Gavin Wright

Author:Gavin Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Riding rail trails

In the 1960s, 5,000 miles of Britain’s railway lines were identified for closure. The Beeching cuts (named after the man who suggested them, Richard Beeching) destroyed many local rail services. But one man’s loss is another man’s gain, as they say, and these dismantled rail lines are just fantastic for bikes.

Rail trails often run through quiet, unspoilt countryside, linking rural towns and villages and giving us the kind of journey that hasn’t been available since the age of steam. Some of them have hard-packed gravel surfaces and some of them are fully or partly sealed, so almost any bike can cope with them. Trains aren’t great on hills, so these lines were never built with a difficult gradient.

For more information about these traffic-free routes, visit www.sustrans.org.uk. You can also find websites set up by enthusiasts extolling the delights (and secrets) of individual rail trails.

In Chapter 20, we provide details for what we believe are two of the best examples of rail trails in the UK.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.