Travel with recumbent bicycles on trains

On our trips we collected quite some practice on traveling with two recumbent bicycles on trains. It was never a problem, even though in several situations we were happy to be two of us to help with narrow doors and couloirs.

From what we have seen, the places are made for bicycles up to two meters long. A short-base recumbent usually being shorter, there have been no problem on fitting them, except the Azub Six on the Swiss IC5 titling trains.

On this post we will be collecting the experience on different types of mainly long-distance trains.

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Cycling across the Alps to San Marino and Venice

Part 1: The change of plans

October 2019. Our plan is to ride from Bern to Berlin, via Munich and Prague. We have never been to Czech Republic and always wanted to ride in East Germany. Everything is organized: we will pick up the keys of the Munich apartment in Winterthur, we have let our Czech friend know we are going to visit her country…

The weather forecast in this beginning of Autumn is not nice: rain and cold. And this at least during the whole next week. Not like the “One Week, Four Countries” tour we did in October 2017.

We packed all our house into six panniers: wardrobe, bed (mattress and blanket), kitchen and repair workshop. The house goes in a separate bag above the panniers. Finally, we have confirmed that the campsite for the first night is still open.

We are on October 4^th 2019, 9 o’clock in the morning when we take a last look at the weather forecast and it really doesn’t look nice. The weather is much better south of the Alps. And if we went there instead?

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One Week, Four Countries: An Autumn Cycle Tour

This October we spent a few days in Austria on a long-planned family holiday. As this included crossing all of Switzerland, we thought we might as well continue the vacation a bit longer and do a short cycle tour from there. We had a week to spend, and we ended up cycling in four countries (Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland) and over four mountain passes (no, actually, five). We went from glorious autumn weather to the beginning of winter. The trip was short (too short!), but it gave us back a bit of the cycle touring feeling we had been missing since coming back home last June.

It was a tough week, but a very happy one.

Read on if you want to know more about it!

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Touring on a recumbent bicycle: Everything you need to know

Why would you ride such a weird bike instead of a normal one?

And what would you need to know before buying a touring recumbent for your next trip? If you’ve already had the chance of talking to a recumbent rider, you may have noticed that most of them say that they love their recumbent and wouldn’t ride anything else.

So, what is it about recumbents that make people so passionate about them?

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So, how was it? – Two recumbents in Portugal

We took this picture almost exactly a year ago. We had just come up a seemingly never-ending uphill in baking heat, and were making our first pedal strokes in Portugal. Little did we know at that time that we would cycle well over 2000 kilometres in this country, spread over the whole year. Summer, winter, spring.

It’s about time I write this post! Continue reading “So, how was it? – Two recumbents in Portugal” →