I actually have those skills, having worked several years at a stable in my long ago youth.
Not only that, I have the leather working skills to maintain, repair, and replace the gear that goes along with working horses. Except for the shoes. If you can’t shoe your horse don’t ride him on pavement or rocky ground.
The big problem with horses is that they eat a LOT, they poop a LOT, and they require a LOT of work. Most people who haven’t worked with them seriously underestimate just how much daily work is required to keep them healthy enough to carry a rider, or the logistics needed to travel any distance with them without jeopardizing their health, stamina, and longevity. If you are barely surviving on your own, or with a hard-scrabble band of survivors, good freakin’ luck trying to maintain livestock. Neglect your post-apoc horses and there are unlikely to be any vets around to take care of them, and even if there were would they have what they need to restore them to health?
You can leave a car parked in a garage or under a tree for a week or a month and it will run just fine. You can’t do that with a horse. They need food and water every day without fail, you can’t ignore them the way you do a machine.
Turn them out to pasture? Sure, you can do that - but watch out, other people might want to steal them for either riding or food, depending on the apocalpse.
100% of the tires and tubes that exist on the Day After will be unusable scrap ~10 years later. If not 10, then 15. Rubber rots whether you’re rolling on it or not. And nobody will be making new bike tires in a post-apocalyptic 1600AD-equivalent subsistence / agrarian society.
As an example: I had a 20’ outboard runabout boat on a trailer. New tires were installed in the spring of 2014. The trailer was hauled ~1500 miles then parked outdoors. For complex and thread-irrelevant reasons it sat untouched for 9 years. A couple of months to move it (to the dump). The tires were not fully flat, and were refilled to the appropriate pressure before the trailer was moved. The tires lasted less than 1/2 mile before they both exploded. One had already suffered sidewall failure just sitting there.
A tire or tube unused out of the sun under zero pressure will last better than my trailer tires did. But still, their life is quite finite.
IMO the answer is animals because animals reproduce and bike, cars, and even canoes do not.
That is a very creativ idea. A big tip o’ the GuyHat to you Good Sir.
The only thing I will offer in opposition is that unused rail lines in forested areas quickly grow saplings between the ties on the tracks. Which can stop a handcar cold. If you are running along a section of right of way regularly you can certainly keep that crap trimmed.
But if your goal is to travel one-way ling distance to newer, happier, hunting grounds, and it’s been a couple years since the apocalypse, you’ll find Mother Nature’s plants have thrown up quite a few obstacles in addition to any issues you have with rail or roadbed deterioration or human vandalism / resource scavenging.
Abandoned trains will also present obstacles to a handcar, and those things are too heavy to easy move any way other than on rails, so you’ll have a hard time getting past obstacles.
In a recent thread, folks were talking about mods to a bike to enable it to run on rail lines (mostly, an outrigger wheel over to the other rail, plus something to lock the steering onto the rail you’re on). That might not be a bad idea.
Back when I was working we used to stay overnight in Eagle, Colorado near Vail.
There was a rail siding there that had a ~50 car string of empty hoppers. Locals told us it had been there since the crash of 2008. The finally removed it in 2014. But it took months for cranes and welding / metal cutting crews to detach the cars rusted together and rusted to the rails then each was lifted off the rails and chopped up on site. The railroad had decided they were not repairable enough to be dragged to a maintenance facility. And this was with the full resources of a 21st century major multi-billion dollar railroad.
100% of the railroad rolling stock will be stuck permanently to the rails wherever they happen to be sitting within a couple years of the Day After. And all the King’s horses and men ain’t doin’ shit to move it.
Something folks tend to forget is that all the maintenance all 8 billion of us do every day on all our crap stops cold in an apocalypse. Real quickly metal rusts, waterways silt up, wood rots, and everything falls apart.
Unused new materiel in warehouses is OK-ish. Until the mold and vermin set in, the roof collapses under snowload, etc. Annual heat/cold cycles destroy the rubber stuff, etc.
The few survivors will be living in incredible material wealth for a couple years, and in credible material poverty a decade or at most two later.
A few of us are really good at living the way we’d need to after the Apocalypse. Folks who already produce and maintain most of what they need. But yeah, give it a few years, and those folks will be all that’s left, as the “preppers” starve amidst their piles of ammunition.
A railroad handcar won’t provide access to the thousands of miles of rail that exist. What it could do is provide a hundreds miles of unobstructed track to travel for several years. That would be rural track extending long distances between urban centers. Switches could be maintained for some time, and abandoned trains and obstructions could be bypassed when there are multiple rails without switches because the cars can easily be moved short distances from rail to rail, and even longer distances over reasonably good roads by outfitting a tire over the wheel or even rigging a separate set of road wheels.
The high speed and load carrying capacity of this vehicle allows the scavenging and stockpiling of valuable resources while moving rapidly for several years. The lifespan of any vehicle is limited after the apocalypse, including pack animals which are also pretty high maintenance.
I think there is something to be said for having a vehicle of some sort immediately after the apocalypse has happened (or near enough…within a week). The vehicle may not last forever but if you need to get away from an urban center this is (probably) the fastest way.
You can also use it for supply runs. Once you find your hiding spot you can make runs to find various supplies and stockpile them. Just faster and more efficient than a bicycle or horse.
Of course, eventually all that stuff will break and supplies from the modern world dwindle to nothing and some form of new “normal” replaces it. But it can help you bridge that gap while you figure out longer term solutions.
If it’s really like Mad Max, I’d go with a Ford Pinto hatchback. Mad Max world they are always ramming into each other, but no one would dare ram a Pinto hatchback!
As seen in Bill’s “Last of Us” episode. Drive the shit out of your truck for the first six months, running around and cleaning out every Home Depot within two hours, gathering everything you could possibly need and building and stocking your compound, and then park the truck and hole up. Pretty much the ideal.
You know what maybe a better choice than a horse? A dog. People have uses dogs to haul sleds and carts for centuries. And dogs-for the most part- are easier to raise than horses.
Many horses are just fine without shoes. Pick a breed with hard hooves like a mustang or Arabian. Horses may eat a lot but it’s stuff that 1. grows by itself and 2. is indigestible by us. Also known as grass. Horses eating grass outdoors do not require any “work” at all. They’re just living their natural lives. And their poop is fertilizer for your garden, which you’ll need if you want to eat as well as move around.
The work would come in if you were using them to labor or as transportation, as they could then need more calories than what they could glean from grazing. That would be from grain or beans. You would also, as pointed out, need to make/repair tack – which means tanning leather from animals you killed (horses are a good source of both meat and leather, by the way). But you’d need to do that even without horses; leather is hard to find a substitute for.
Draft dogs, on the other hand, are carnivores, and unless you have a ready source of meat that you can spare, it will be onerous to feed very many of them. Also dogs aren’t even as strong as people, while horses are much much stronger. Dogs have other advantages though – they can help you hunt, keep watch, and defend you from male humans and hungry predators.
Post apocalypse, humans will need to depend on animals and plants for survival. Simple machines that are powered by water, gravity, or beasts of burden will be far more important than the remnants of the industrial age. Just, y’know, my opinion.
I wander the wasteland alone, just looking for a controller chip for my water purifier. A vehicle would just get in the way of my adventures, and besides, the roads are all broken and are a haven for raiders and deathclaws.
