For those who live in countries with a large number of abandoned railways, a popular way of exploration is to use homemade railway cars. These are usually simple rail cars with small internal combustion engines. You can find many interesting videos online. However, such a trolley has one disadvantage – it is not the most compact equipment. [Cato] invented an extremely portable rail car, replacing the engine with a pair of air cushion plate liners.
The chassis of the machine is made of aluminum extrusion, and its deck is made of plywood. These wheels are log suspension plate wheels with flat flanges. Although they do not have the ideal flange profile of rail wheels, they are enough to keep them on the rails. Finally, in order to control this, a relatively fashionable small 3D printing single axis joystick acts as a combination of accelerator and brake.
Those of us from the place where the abandoned railway track was rapidly torn can only stare with envy and imagine speeding along one of the railways. This version warns against using one of them on the active track at the beginning, but if you want to drive a real train, there are many places to do so.