"Railway Motorcycle" Takes a Boring Job and Fills It With Adrenaline: Work/Play Balance

Ok, so we've seen motorcycles ridden through forests, on black tops, jumped over gorges, and even dropped out of airplanes. Do you know the one place where we haven't seen a motorcycle? On a set of railroad tracks, and that's precisely what today's idea expresses and encapsulates into the neat little visual design we have here.

Folks, the idea we'll be exploring today results from a group of students getting together and coming up with another form of transportation. However, as I mentioned earlier, this conceptual two-wheeler is designed to function on a railway. It's a motorcycle to be used by railway servicemen and women who tend to these steel veins, uniting the organs of numerous nations.

Frankly, it's one industry that seems to be lacking in any visual change. Sure, locomotives and other ways of moving tons and tons of metal on steel wheels have been conceived over the years, but the way we relocate folks from one worksite to another seems to have received very little attention.

Now, the idea is simple: you take a motorcycle, drop it on a railroad track, find a way to ensure it stays upright, and off you go. That's the most basic way to describe what's going on here. In truth, the visual exploration of this idea expresses quite a bit more, so I'll do my best here.

According to LICC (London International Creative Competition), the contest where this creation won the "Finalists in Use" prize, what I've described above is all we have, but the images in the gallery offer some much-needed insight into what's really going on.

As you would think, anytime you drop something on a railway, you'd need steel wheels that grasp the rail. Not the Railway Motorcycle. Because the wheels on this bike are also suitable for good old asphalt and would offer no stability, once you've been called to the job, you lift this bike onto a steel line, and at the press of a button, part of that orange stripe you see making up the frame lowers and clamps onto a rail, securing the bike in an upright position and ensuring that you don't fly off the proverbial rail.

One aspect of this machine is the way the wheels work, with no hubs, showcasing a design quite a few vehicles have explored before. Heck, even some real machines have expressed a hubless design with gears. One advantage that this system seems to offer the Railway Motorcycle is that it lowers the center of gravity much better than a classic motorcycle design, but part of that is also because of the way the frame is designed.

Nonetheless, let's say you answer that call from earlier, hop onto your bike, and ride to your destination easily, safely, and quickly. Fix whatever you need to fix, and, as an added bonus, once you're done with everything, take your trinket back to your asphalt playground and head home. Grab a hot tea or a cold brew and call it a night.

I understand that this may not be the sort of machine that we'll see in real life, but it doesn't have to be. Maybe this one can just be used to inspire subsequent generations and minds to look at things differently, with no limits other than imagination.