Anyone eknow of a Raleigh 3 speed bike that the third gear was reverse.?

A reverse gear on a bicycle makes no sense. Some adult tricycles have them.

Possibly a club bike with a sturmey-archer asc, broken in such a way that while third was still fixed (locked) as it should have been, first and second gears were freewheeling?

Well, then it seems to me that it was a hub intended for the nordic region where they have these tadpole-layout trike truck-bikes (I forget what they're called) and was probably put on a regular bike either by accident or just as a "duct-tape-solution" to get by temporarily with the intent of putting a regular hub on the bike at tye earliest convenience...which obviously never arrived.

Another uneducated guess is that the standard trikes' transmissions used standard 3spd shells and were pre-drilled to be installed within a wheel as well as in the center-rear of a regular trike and, while sitting on the bench at a bike shop or in someone's garage was mistakenly selected to be installed into a bike wheel and the bike got sold with it purely accidentally.

I doubt the circus hypothesis only because most "artistic bikes" are pure fixed gear.

I agree, the reverse gear was probably the result of a broken gear. Gears inside a hub are small by necessity; and due to the material science of the day, fitting even three-speeds in a hub meant lots of small, very breakable parts.

reverse

it doesnt; even seem possible much less sensible

certainly would be useless

are you sure it went backward when yuo pedaled forward?

why?

possibly it was broken and somehow one of the gears was fixed and not freewheeling

still that isn;t really ''reverse''

wle