The Cinder Track

About 10 years ago Scarborough was declared a Renaissance Town. This was  a national initiative to improve the quality of our urban infrastructure so that the towns and cities involved would become more attractive places in which to live, work and set up business. The process was sponsored by the then regional development agency, Yorkshire Forward, and was managed by a locally appointed Town Team supported by a variety of action groups. With the assistance of a Dutch urban design company, West 8, a visionary masterplan, Kissing Sleeping Beauty, was eventually drawn up and some of the proposals eventually came to fruition.

My part in all this was to set up an action group that looked at how we could improve the town for walking and cycling. Amongst the traditional establishment this was not seen as a major concern but I knew that one of the inspirational figures behind the whole renaissance process, the architect Richard Rogers, had identified a major failing with British towns and cities in that they'd allowed themselves to become dominated by cars and were no longer comfortable places to either walk or cycle.

Determined not just to be a talking shop but to see actual progress on the ground we managed to get one or two things done and, in particular, set up a Friends Group to develop the old Scarborough to Whitby railway line as safe route for walkers and cyclists.

Manor Road Steps 

(the very first renaissance project to hit the ground)

Since then we've managed to make other access points, put in bins, benches and picnic tables, produce a leaflet for the track that's now been reproduced over 40,000 times etc.etc. but we still haven't managed to get the track up to the standard that we'd like. See Smooth enough for buggies and wheelchairs. 

However, I was recently approached by a local artist, Joy Lomas, who has an exhibition coming up this autumn that is themed around the town's urban renaissance. Included in this will be a picture of the Cinder Track and I've been invited to write 150 words to go with it. Here they are

According to Lord Rogers, who inspired Urban Renaissance, British towns and cities had become dominated by traffic and needed to become more comfortable for walking and cycling. The old railway line from Scarborough to Whitby (The Cinder Track) runs through the northern part of Scarborough and provides a perfect alternative route for those who choose to get about under their own steam. Used for over half a million trips a year, our aim has been to improve access to the track, and its quality; so that it's smooth enough for buggies and wheelchairs and wide enough to get past two people walking together..

By encouraging people to incorporate modest amounts of physical activity into their everyday lives, we not only improve their physical and mental health but also reduce social isolation and, if it gets them out of their cars, cut pollution, noise and congestion at the same time.

The Friends of the Old Railway logo

Town, sea and moors

Courtesy of Colin Foster

Nature's recipes

In he middle of next month the Mayor of Scarborough and his wife are setting out on a cycle tour of the Borough. It isn't often that local politicians in our area take cycling seriously and, since its been something that I've gently been campaigning about for years, I made sure that I got invited to the organising committee meetings and found myself recruited as one of the guides on this year's inaugural ride.

Now whilst I may use a bike as my everyday means of transport and head off into the North York Moors National Park for the odd hour or two, I'm by no means a well practiced cycle tourist and am not one of those people who happily set out for a 100km + ride every weekend. This means that to make sure that I can appear to cope effortlessly with 320km of very hilly riding over 4 days I've been getting in some training and as a one time physiologist I couldn't help but find out what effect this must be having on my body.

One of nature's not so well hidden secrets is that whilst DNA provides a recipe it doesn't provide a blueprint. A favourite example of this is demonstrated by a simple experiment carried out on young chicks. Attach a contact lens to the chick's eye so that the image that's being formed on its developing retina is thrown out of focus and the eye changes shape to make the image clear again. So there isn't a detailed set of instructions to be followed to the letter rather a general idea that is then adapted to the circumstances.

There are loads of much simpler examples of what is now called Adaptive Self Organisation; A tree trunk will by thicker in the direction of the prevailing wind, an astronauts skeleton gets thinner when subjected to micro gravity and muscles get bigger when you exercise them.

But with muscles there are two different types of training. One of these is simple strength training. Subject a muscle to repeated large loads and the fibres get biggger. The other is endurance training, and that's the sort that began to interest me. It turns out that when you repeatedly use a muscle, even at relatively low loads, there are two major changes. The first is that the numbers of mitichondria (the little intracellular energy processing plants that use glucose to turn ADP into ATP which, in turn, is used by the proteins in the muscle fibres as an energy source to ratchet themselves along each other and generate force) increase. The second is that the number of capillaries that supply blood to the muscle fibres, and consequently oxygen and nutrients, also increase.

Now this increase in capillaries also happens with strength training but, it turns out, in a slightly different way. One of the consequences of strength training is that the muscle fibres, and capillaries, suffer direct damage and that during the repair process the damaged capillaries produce sideways sprouts (that can get through the thin layer of connective tissue that surrounds the capillary) and thereby make sure that the new enlarged muscle fibres get a new enlarged blood supply. With endurance training the effects are subtly different. Rather than burst out sideways, new capillaries are formed when an existing capillary simply cleaves along its length; leaving two parallel capillaries where there was one before and without having to break through the surrounding connective tissue. 

Of course, once you get into thinking about this process more and more questions spring to mind. How did the capillary "know" that it needed to split? Once it "knew" how does it tell the cells that its made of what to do? etc. etc. This process involves a great long chain of biochemical processes, all of them are thoroughly ignorant of the final intent. Suffice it to say that, as a physicist at heart (that is as someone too lazy to remember the names of all the parts and happy to just have some basic idea of what's going on), I was interested to discover that the basic signal telling the cells of the capillary that something needs to be done comes from the shear stress felt by the capillary walls as blood flows past.

Take an old fashioned eraser in your hands (the sort you'd use to rub out pencil marks) push one side one way and the other side the other. That's a shear stress. If you pump more blood down the capillary the speed of the blood flow will increase and so will the shear stress felt by the blood vessel's walls. So new capillaries are formed just where they're needed.

In't nature brilliant...