History of the bicycle fashion of the day made the "ordinary" bicycle inaccessible. Queen Victoria owned Starley's "Royal Salvo" tricycle, though there is no evidence she actually rode it. Although French and English inventors modified the velocipede into the high-wheel bicycle, the French were still recovering from the Franco-Prussian war, so English entrepreneurs put the high-wheeler on the English market, and the machine became very popular there, Coventry, Oxford, Birmingham and Manchester being the centers of the English bicycle industry (and of the arms or sewing machine industries, which had the necessary metalworking and engineering skills for bicycle manufacturing, as in Paris and St.
High-speed rail in the United Kingdom aiming to establish conventional high-speed wheel-on-rail technology as the mode of choice for new lines. The group has performed studies on routeing, environmental issues and the use of high-speed rail as an alternative to short-haul airlines. Currently it is proposing a new high-speed line between, at first, London and Birmingham. This is tentatively called High Speed Two. It was reported in August 2006 that London and Continental Railways (the developers of HS1) was to put forward a high-speed rail scheme to the Department for Transport this autumn. Its scheme would cost between £12 billion and £19 billion depending on the