File:DSC00529 - Motorized draisine GTR 10 (48167665491).jpg

English: Maintenance of the railways was assigned to teams based staggered every 15 to 20 kilometres, on a portion of track called a "section". Supervised by a foreman, ten men intervened in all weathers. In addition to these trackmen, there were also mobile teams maintaining the telegraph network and teams for various lights and visual signals.

Small light vehicles, easily installed and removed from the track, were developed for this purpose. The human powered handcar could carry one or two people. They were called "velocipedes" after the patent for a tricycle rolling on streetcar tracks deposited in 1869 by two Americans, Aspinwall and Perry; it was ten years before George S. Sheffield adapted the concept to railway tracks and improved the transmission!

The Chicago-based Buda company shook-up the track maintenance vehicle industry by mass producing, beginning in 1909, a version equipped with a small gasoline engine; it was a four-horsepower air-cooled single-cylinder engine. Draisine No. 10, with its four wheels, is regarded as the link between the manual powered handcar and the motorized "speeder". Yet the Sheffield Company, based in Three Rivers, Michigan, was the first to build a motorized draisine in 1898, as evidenced by a copyright infringement lawsuit against Buda which was settled around 1911.

The success of speeder grew after the First World War. In Canada, railways, Canadian Pacific in particular, used to rent this equipment to their trackmen. It was not until 1939 that motorized speeder were provided at no additional cost!

When this was vehicle acquired by the Association in 1960, it was still being used occasionally by Central Vermont. It was still in working order thanks in great part to the simplicity of its motor and the robustness of its construction. It was used by the Grand Trunk Railway in 1910, and then by its successor, the Canadian National. The purchase price cost was $225, a sizeable sum in those days. Its operation was very simple as that era’s advertisements indicate: "Simple enough for a boy to operate".

All the information used with the pictures was taken from information at the Canadian Railway Museum Site.

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