Longdendale

While I have been neglecting this corner of the internet, things have been happening elsewhere. Mine and Mrs Langsett's time in Manchester has been running out. I'd always assumed it would be a life sentence, but there's a finishing line in sight (although it is moving around a bit at the moment).

So I've been trying to do a few things on the bike that I somehow managed to not do very often in all the time I've spent in Manchester. The middle of August was soggy, and I headed out to Longdendale early one Sunday morning to ride the Transpennine Trail from Hadfield up to Woodhead and back.

If you've never had the pleasure, Longdendale is a beautiful Peak District valley. At its lower end you can see Manchester taking up the  whole of the horizon, and sometimes Wales off in the distance. It's upper end twists and turns into the heart of the Pennines. The Woodhead Pass climbs up though the valley on one side, but you can also ride up the other side on the Transpennine Trail. 

The Trail used to be the main railway line between South Yorkshire and the North West, but it was closed and lifted in the early eighties. It is very hard not to ride this section of the Trail without chewing over the stupidity of not just closing this line, but also making it impossible to ever re-open it. But it is still a lovely place to ride a bike. Particularly, as it turns out, on a rainy August morning when the heather is in flower and there are clouds the size of Jersey rolling heavily over the surrounding hills. 

Hadfield looked great in the grey, early morning light, yellow sodium streetlights still lit, like the aftermath of some epic night out. There was a bit of sweating and huffing and puffing to heft the Inferno up the main street of the village to the station, where the railway line finishes and the trail begins.

It's uphill all the way to Woodhead, but the trail was graded for heavy freight trains to use so you'll be aware of the climb but not troubled by it.

One of the great things about this ride is the way that the hills unfold and change around you as you ride higher. On a quiet morning, you'll be able to hear each car passing on the road on the other side of the valley.

The trail is surfaced in limestone gravel and as it was wet, a soupy spray of the stuff ended up all over the Inferno and me.

Towards the top of the valley, the hills crowd in until all of a sudden, you're there at the summit. There are two utterly terrifying Victorian tunnel mouths; Gothic, dark and exhaling rotten, clammy air straight out of a graveyard crypt. And one larger, less scary tunnel which the National Grid are converting to carry power lines under the moors. If you climb to the top of the tunnel mouths, this is the stark, beautiful view back down towards Manchester.

The ride back down the hill is brilliant. You have the gradient with you, and it feels marvellous sweeping round the old railway line's graceful curves, hugging the shores of the reservoirs.

Heading back into my bit of Greater Manchester, I noticed that the local authority had burned off the cycle lane markings down one side of this road. The Transpennine Trail runs fairly close to my bit of town, and this road is how you reach it. You can see that the centre line of the road has been moved over, forcing cars and bikes to compete for space on one side.

And here's why the bike lane is needed. Most drivers clip the corner. If the markings were replaced instead of being removed, it would remind drivers that there's a good chance of finding someone on a bike just around this bend. Taking the changes at face value, it's hard to see how they can be in anyone's interest. If you're on a bike, they are just unsafe.

The Greater Manchester authorities are all supposed to be encouraging cycling. I haven't seen any kind of consultation or explanation of these changes. It will be interesting to see what the motivation is.

The new commute - Part 2: In which The Langsett's lamentably late looking locates a lovely little line linking home and work...

A few weeks ago I did some low level griping about the high-ish potential for death and serious injury that could be found on my new ride to work.

Since then I have dealt with used cunning and lateral thinking to circumvent the issue. In short, I have been driving to work.

And the drive is pretty good: there is a big motorway passing not far from the fragrant gardens and handsome wrought iron gates of Chateau Langsett, from where it sweeps over the Ship Canal and up the hill past Worsley - creating the formidable barrier which made me grouchy when I tried the ride by bike - through an excitingly curvy junction with another motorway before firing the Polo at surprising velocity into a new NCP multistorey car park next to a handsome Georgian church.

Furthermore, the immense gravitational pull of Manchester city centre sucks virtually all vehicular traffic towards in in the morning, while its gag reflex spits it all back out in the evening. So my side of the motorway is a kind of empty, Robert Moses designed fantasy world of empty tarmac a hundred feet wide, while the other side is crammed full of stationary vehicles of all shapes and sizes.

At times, it feels like I might be building up a considerable store of commuting bad luck which will come crashing down on me at some point in the future.

It has also been making my legs feel weird. Instead of pushing me and my bike to work and back, the right one depresses the accelerator slowly all the way to the floor as I go up the ramp onto the motorway, then presses the brake pedal slowly all the way to the floor when I arrive at the multistorey car park. My left foot taps nervously on bits of interior trim. I am not, in short, getting the same use out of them as I was when I was riding to work, and the result is me jogging up and down stairs at work to get cups of tea and stationary that I don't really need.

I need to sort out a better ride to work, I thought. If only there was some kind of route planning website  - oh! That was easy!

Feeling a bit shamefaced for being so grumpy about cycling provision in Manchester, I realised that by stringing together the rubbish, painted on cycle lanes around the massive shopping centre, the Bridgewater Canal towpath and National Cycle Route 55, I could do almost all of the ride off road. Well, ok, the last bit into Bolton looked a bit flaky. But what would Fred do?

 
He would probably knock out the bricks on one side, hold it up with pit props and then get Mrs Dibnah to set fire to it, creating one of the most awesome spectacles known to man

The biking equivalent of which is trying it out right away. Out came the mighty British Eagle.

Over the miracle motorway...

...and then the Bridgewater Canal takes you to Monton, where you can nip up through this little gate onto NCN Route 55. This stretch of Route 55 runs along an old railway line, first on top of an embankment and then, as the ground rises, through a cutting. It's great: there were fields with cows having an evening snack over to one side, and then the quiet tree lined tunnel of the cutting with families taking an evening walk. There was even...

...a choice of routes. Tyldesley and Leigh are off to the left (I think). Bolton is to the right. The route is all uphill, but it's a nice, constant gradient and easy to steam up at a good speed.

There's a lot going on in this bit of Greater Manchester at the moment, as far as cycling is concerned. Part of the route into Leigh that you can see branching off to the left above is being turned into a guided busway with a traffic free cycle and footpath alongside. Also, Salford City Council have just secured funding to put in a further 1.5 km of traffic free cycle path to provide access to Port Salford, Peel Holdings' enormous distribution estate next to the Ship Canal.

It's not perfect: there are signs telling you where NCN 55 goes all over the show while you're in Salford, but none at all when you cross into Bolton. The other thing that happens in Bolton is that the route suddenly ends in a big clump of buddleia with someone's back garden to one side and a field to the other side. Somewhere close by the was the constant exhale noise of the motorway. A couple of miles zig zagging though random streets was needed at this point, but eventually:

In Bolton, it was very much all going off. Bradshawgate is deathly quiet in the day time, but now it was decorated with the blue flashing lights of a police car. Some ladies were sitting in the highway having a word with the officer while cheery revellers watched from the bars lining the street.

Feeling pretty chuffed with myself, I headed for home, back though the "challenging" bit of the route:

And then back onto the old railway line. It was properly dark now, and it turned out that my little Cateye front light was more for decoration than for actually lighting up the path. A lad in a dark hooded sweater loomed up out of the darkness a yard or two off the starboard bow and then just as quickly vanished behind. Some pale lumps in the path turned out to be another pair of Boltonians, both of whom had had quite a lot of Vimto, sitting on the ground discussing where to go next. Ten more minutes of being utterly terrified that I was going to ride off the side of the embankment, and I popped out of the little gate again back in Monton.

In other bike news, the cycling revolution is pretty much complete. Proof of this came from my brother Matt, a gentleman who routinely spends his Saturdays boiling his back tyres on drag strips up and down the UK.

"I noticed I was turning into a bit of a porker," said Matt, "so I bought a bike."

And this is what he bought:

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo yeah.

The realisation that I needed a BMX of my own so that I could pick up from where I left off - that is, jumping off ramps made from an old bit of wood propped up at one end with a brick - came more or less instantly. My own BMX arrived as a Christmas present when I was about 8. It was a chrome Kuwahara Laserlite. Of course I didn't know that at the time. I just knew it wasn't the Raleigh Burner that I secretly coveted. I nearly had a bit of a cry when I realised how much it would cost to go on that nostalgia trip

Inferno: renaissance

As you'll know if you call round here frequently, The Langsett's awkwardly coloured, heavy-but-fragile British Eagle Inferno recently did itself a mischief while climbing a Welsh stream.

Back home, Kate came to give me some advice. "Daddy's bike is rubb-ish and he's going to cry because it's broken!" she sang happily. This was a pretty accurate summary of the situation. In the bike cave, I took the back end of the Inferno apart and stared in slack jawed horror at the chewed up drop out. I didn't want to take the bike to the tip. But I also didn't want to spend any money on repairing it. Or any time. Or any physical effort. I just wanted it to carry on working without getting all mardy until a sudden financial windfall allows me to replace it with something amazing and totally bulletproof.

I did some half hearted searching on ebay to see whether I could get a similarly free replacement. I actually found another British Eagle in a white and fluorescent orange paint job with a similarly fiery name - it might have been called a Conflagration or something - but I wasn't able to bridge the gap between what the seller wanted for it (£90) and what I was prepared to pay (£0). So in the end I called Phil at my local bike shop, Eddie McGrath Cycles. I gave him a full blow-by-blow account and asked him what he thought.

Phil sucked his breath in.

"I wouldn't go riding it up a stream again. " he said.

He thought about it a bit more. "Don't worry about it.", he said, "It'll probably bend back with a bit of heat. The main thing is to stick something in the derailleur hanger so it doesn't go all wonky." He was as good as his word too. A couple of hours later, the bike was back together and not working any more badly than it did before its brush with the rocky Welsh stream.

I noticed some extra bits of rust and scratched paint when I was putting the bike back together, but to my mind these just contribute to the badass aesthetic of the Inferno. It is a bike that wears the evidence of its frequent chaotic passage through undergrowth and mud proudly, and I like to think it commands respect because of this.

By coincidence, The Langsett and family visited friends in Yorkshire over the weekend, including all star engineer and generally top lad Rick. Rick lives at the top of a lovely hill in a scenic bit of the Yorkshire Pennines. His engineering job is at the bottom, and Rick's decided to get ripped by cycling to work and back. "So I set a limit of £25 on ebay and had a look to see what I could find." he said. "And I got this..." He showed me a picture of the bike on his phone; it was a very fresh aluminium Claud Butler mountain bike, more or less never used. It cost Rick exactly the same as it cost me to have Phil straighten the Inferno's drop out.

The free bike: or, The Ballad of the Inferno

Riding a bike often feels amazing. After all, who would  not be seduced by racing though a forest, being whipped across the face by tree branches, on something which looks like it might have been built in a secondary school CDT class? Or leaning your bike over so far in a fast corner that your pedal bounces of the tarmac?

There's another side to cycling that I love and that is the bizarre economics of it. Riding a bike can be incredibly expensive. Bike firms like Specialized will happily let you hand over a massive dump truck full of money in exchange for a bike a bit like Mark Cavendish's. Who buys these things? Chaps who wax their legs, that's who. This approach to cycling is built on a massive surplus of cash and a willingness to indulge certain well known bike firms in their experiment to see what kind of price tag they can attach to a bike before someone claps them on the back in a manly way and congratulates them on the scale and ambition of the joke. Turned one of the simplest and most useful machines ever invented by man into a weird plaything for the super rich? Well done!

There's another way to approach cycling, which is essentially to try not to spend much money on it. Bikes - some bikes - essentially last for ever. While other pieces of machinery expire around them, bikes can keep rolling along, sustained by their extreme simplicity and the surprising expertise that often went into making even basic bikes. My Claud Butler is like this. I bought it from its first owner, whose mum and dad had got it for him as a present for getting a grammar school place back at the end of the 1960's. Every major component is the one that the bike left the factory with, and none of them show any signs of wearing out. You might not think that extreme tight fistedness is a sound way to enjoy something. But the Claud is a little tangerine miracle, full of soul and warmth. As you can see, I invest a fair bit of emotional attachment in the bike. But the bike pays me back. It is game for whatever, and when I catch sight of it, it always makes me smile. There it is, orange paint glowing slightly, looking fast even when it is standing still. Saddle up, handlebars down, fewer spokes on the front wheel than on the back.

The Claud taught me that dramatic improvements in athletic performance can come with practice. I kind of knew that already. But the Claud doled out an actual three dimensional lesson, so that I really know that now. What happened was this: I did a charity bike ride through the night to the coast. It was only 54 miles, and the gradient profile was beautiful; all the climbing was in the first third of the route, and the remainder was gently downhill to the sea. It nearly killed me, and my legs felt so weird - massive and useless - at the end of the ride. Watching the black sky fade to grey behind Blackpool Tower, I promised myself I would never participate in this kind of self inflicted pain-a-thon again.

Luckily the ride was not repeated for a year, which was exactly the amount of time for me to doubt the horribleness of the experience and sign up again. It also allowed me to get a bit of practice in. Well, a lot of practice in, actually. I changed bikes too, dropping the heavy, uncomfortable bike for the Claud. The Claud is, according to the scales, only a kilo lighter. But is has magic and alchemy powering its moving parts as well as me, so it feels a lot lighter. The ride out of Manchester was completely different. I kept wanting to overtake and going for it. I told myself to calm down a bit, and started looking around for someone who was going at a pace which seemed quick but not exhausting. I didn't have anyway of seeing how fast I was going, and I knew it would help me pace myself if I had someone else for reference. Eventually, I found two lads who were making good speed on an Enigma and a Specialized. I tucked in behind them, and drafted them up the long, steady climb towards the summit in Blackrod.

It felt much quicker, and it was: when I reached the finish in Blackpool, it was still definitely Saturday night rather than Sunday morning, with scenes of drunken carnage being acted out one street back from the seafront. I checked my times when I got home, and was pleasantly surprised to find I'd knocked an hour off my time from the year before.

Then there's the money side of things. Because the Claud was built with components that apparently never wear out, all I have to do to is ride it instead of driving the car and my bank balance automatically starts to look healthier. I keep expecting this trick to stop working, but it will be four years next month since I bought the Claud and so far it never has.

A word of caution though: Bicycle economics works on slightly different rules to normal economics. So you can't assume that all bikes will work in the same, miraculous way that the Claud does. This piece is really about The Free Bike. The Free Bike is a British Eagle Inferno, a not-quite-mountain bike from the dawn of the 1990's, afflicted with a Global Hypercolour / Jamaican flag themed fade paintjob and a name which slightly sounds like the name of far right political party's journal. I got The Free Bike when Mrs L was having one of her periodic sessions of throwing away anything not part of the fabric of the house. I was cheerily throwing the latest load into the tip when I noticed a gentlemen unloading a couple of bikes from his car. I hailed him, and enquired whether the bikes would be going into the tip. He confirmed that they would. I immediately found a place in my heart for The Free Bike (though sadly not for the pink and silver Emmelle that was its companion) and took it home. If I hadn't been steering, I would have been doing some Fagan style rubbing my hands with glee. I made the mistake, you see, of assuming that because The Free Bike charged me nothing for the privilege of coming to live with me, it was - like the Claud - going to cost me nothing for the duration of its stay.

In fact, The Free Bike quickly revealed a massive appetite for components. It snapped a brake cable, exploded a tyre, massacred a seatpost bolt and bent a saddle. It shattered a chain, ate the bearings in the pedals, destroyed a cassette and snapped another brake cable. I loved it though, and treated it as though it was a reliable way of getting to work even though it clearly wasn't.

The Langsetts went on holiday to Pembrokeshire last week, and The Free Bike came with us. That's where the picture at the head of this piece was taken, half way through brilliant blast along some forest tracks, watching the sun sparkle on the rain drops. But this was the ride where The Free Bike's appetite for destruction finally caught up with it.

Coming back up the hill, there was an innocuous "Twang!" noise from somewhere down in the engine room. The back wheel abruptly stopped turning, so I got off to see what the problem was. In fact, there were about four or five separate problems, each one of which had caused another failure to follow it until the back end of the bike looked like this:

The back wheel that has slipped out of alignment, the derailleur caught in the back wheel, the chain down the back of the cassette - all these things are fixable. But if you look closely, you'll see that the drop out - the little yellow 'C' shaped bit of metal that holds the back axle - has peeled open. You might want to amuse yourself by zooming in on the earlier photo to see whether you can spot any evidence of the whole back end falling apart; I know I have.

The drop out's going to need replacing, and I'm not sure what The Langsett Guide to Frugal Bicycling says about damage to frames which would cost more to repair than a replacement frame would cost to buy. The Free Bike is up on the repair stand at the moment waiting for me to work out how to deal with the fact that it suddenly is not free at all.