The combined driving carriage is the name of the vehicle that you drive in during competition. Learn about combined driving carriages with help from a combined driving expert in this video clip.
Hi, I'm Sterling Graburn, the Head Trainer of the Gayla Driving Center. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about combined driving carriages. This is is my single carriage. It's Swedish made and it's known as the TH or The World Cup Carriage and there's a number of, of safety features on this vehicle and also just some design features that are, they kind of unique that, that I'll talk about little bit. When the, with carriage driving, when you have an accident turnover, it's ordinarily the carriage either hit something or slides and then, stop sliding. So, this carriage manufacturer has done something very interesting and they beveled the carriage wheel so that on the downhill side, on the out hill, outside of the slide, the, the bevel will slide and, and, and bump over the carriage rather, bump over the obstacle rather than catching on it and turning over. On the uphill side, assuming we're sliding to the right, then, you have an, a strong vertical edge that will catch and so the uphill side is catching and the downhill side is sliding; a little bit like a ski. The driver's seat is angled. We have rear brakes on this carriage. Some vehicles will have front hand rear brakes. We don't want the driver actually tied in the carriage because if the carriage will turn offset and the driver were tied in, then, that could be quite unpleasant to the driver. So, we don't do that. We have a couple different suspension systems on here in the front. We have a three-leaf platform suspension. In the back, we have a trailing arm with a coil over gas shock. So, the carriage rides quite nicely. A couple of interesting things back here; we have padding so that the navigator doesn't beat themselves up in the back of the carriage. You can, you can really see from the angle here that the, that this fender is, is designed so that we don't get any posts in between wheels. As you can imagine the posts in between wheels would be a sharp stop. So, this carriage is kind of designed for cross country detected. If you get close to an obstacle, it's just going to slide right past it. The navigator's job on the back is to take care of the time, so, we'd have a couple of stopwatches here or time could come in here and then, the navigator rides in the back. And so, the navigator's job would ballast back here so we have a nice workspace; what I like to call nice workspace where they can come and lean at, at speed, whichever way they're going and the good handles here depending on the higher the navigator; so, it's a, it's a good comfortable thing. We, we do wear a marathon vests; you know, the, the same way to the three-day riders so that the jockeys. For the navigators, one of the reasons they do is because you got this bar across here and it's not that uncommon to, to chest the bar; so, we like the vest for that reason too even if we don't use it for anything else. This carriage also has disc brakes on the rear. This is a single carriage; it probably weighs 380, about 380 pounds, so it's like most single carriage it's a little bit heavier than what the, the rules require; but, it makes it heavy enough to still be fairly stable on the ground. And the rear disc brakes, which it's important to remember for drivers that the disc brakes are there to still, to slower stop the carriage, not to slower stop the horse. So, if you see somebody and the horse is going along and the brakes are locked up, they've forgotten to take, they put off the brakes. And that's a, a quick overview of a, of a marathon vehicle.
