Important Message
We have some unfortunate news to report concerning our upcoming summer plans to operate our handcar fleet across the Monterey Branch Line. Last summer after two years of hard work…
Casting Bronze Plaques
If you look at our handcar closely you may notice a number of details. One such detail are the four bronze plaques that adorn each touring car. We make these…
Monterey Branch Line Here We Come!
On February 24, 2021 the Transportation Agency of Monterey County approved our lease for demonstrating our handcar concept across the Monterey Branch Line. On March 4 we performed a walking…
Handcar Tourism Demonstration Event
In September 2020 we traveled to Ely, Nevada and hosted a tourism demonstration event to test our concept. The event advertised through Facebook was a success with participants traveling from…
Making Axles
https://vimeo.com/383662482 One of the more interesting tasks is fabricating our handcar axles. On a conventional car the axle is a solid round rod. This is not an efficient design as…
Building Wheels
Building handcar wheel centers is not a simple exercise. Each wheels is made up of 18 pieces of precision cut top grade hard maple and white ash lumbers. The diameter…
Boring Holes
Drilling holes may seem trivial, but it is quite a complicated task when each of the dozens of holes found on the handcar need to be perfectly lined up. To…
Making Gears
We manufacture the 90 spur gears that will make up our first run of touring handcars. Our gears arrive from the foundry as cast iron blanks. Before teeth can be…
Handcar Manufacturing
Mason is currently working over 100 hours a week on the handcar manufacturing project. Seven days a week he begins at 9am, and works in the shop until 6pm. Then…
Handcar Lumber Arrives
We took delivery of 1500 board feet of white ash and hard maple lumber to build our handcars. This lumber order is particularly sad as it will be our last…