The term monorail or industrial monorail is used to describe any number of transport systems in which a chair or carrier is suspended from, or rides on, an overhead rail structure. Unlike the well-known duo-rail system, there are many rail-guided transport options which have been described as monorails, so that tracing the history presents a demarcation problem regarding what should be included and what should be omitted. Common usage appears to define a monorail as any rail-guided vehicle which does not employ the coning action of conventional adhesion railways to achieve directional stability. This would exclude rack railways and funicular railways. Another generally accepted rule is that the guideway or track must be narrower than the car/vehicle. Elevated, supported, cable propelled systems like the Cable Liner and MiniMetro are generally not considered to be monorails. Bearing in mind the pattern of development of conventional railways, different criteria and measures of effectiveness were relevant at different times, and alternative design solutions were proposed. Hence, a monorail of the early 19th century bears little resemblance to current designs, and were optimized for different performance objectives, within different technological constraints.
Early developments
The earliest patent for a vehicle designed to run on a single rail can be traced to UK patent No 4618 dated 22 November 1821. The inventor was Henry Robinson Palmer, who described it as 'a single line of rail, supported at such height from the ground as to allow the centre of gravity of the carriages to be below the upper surface of the rail'. The vehicles straddled the rail, rather like a pair of pannier baskets on a mule. Propulsion was by horse. A line was built in 1824 in the Deptford Dockyard in London, and in 1825, another line was built in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire. Dubbed the Cheshunt Railway, this line made history as it was the world's first passenger-carrying monorail, and the first railway line to open in Hertfordshire. In 1826 a company was formed to construct a line between Barmen and Elberfeld in Germany, but construction never started. Throughout the 19th century, the Palmer design was improved, with the addition of stabilising wheels and additional rails (rendering a misnomer of 'monorail'). In 1829, Maxwell Dick introduced 'safety rails' below the running rails to reduce the likelihood of derailment. He also articulated the main advantage claimed for this class of vehicle: 'the pillars or supports to be of different heights as circumstances of the country may require'. In other words, the system was better suited for crossing rough terrain. In 1868, William Thorold M.I.C.E. presented a paper proposing a monorail system that could be built at ground level in or alongside roads. The Patiala State Monorail Trainways and Kundala Valley Railway were built in India on the principle that he described. In 1869, J Haddon built a monorail in Syria to replace a mule train in military use. This embodied lateral guide rails, but was basically a pannier design hauled by a locomotive having double vertical steam boilers. General LeRoy Stone demonstrated in 1876 his Centennial Monorail for transporting passengers, but failed to exploit the concept also on the Bradford and Foster Brook Monorail, and this was closed after only one year due to a lethal boiler explosion in 1879. Around 1879, Joseph Stringfellow devised a similar "one-rail" system for possible use as a "cheap railway" in Australia. By the end of the 19th century, the main proponents for the monorail were Charles Lartigue and F. B. Behr. Lartigue constructed Palmer monorails in Algeria to transport esparto grass, to replace mules and camels, although the motive power is recorded as 'animal'. He also demonstrated his ideas in Paris (1884), Westminster (1886), Tours (1889), St Petersburg (1894), Long Island (1894) and Brussels (1897). Behr proposed a high speed monorail between Liverpool and Manchester, but construction never started through lack of financial support. The most famous Lartigue monorail was the Listowel and Ballybunion Railway, in Ireland, which stayed in service from 1888 until 1924. Part of this railway survives as a preserved railway and tourist attraction. The last Lartigue design was built in 1924 between a magnesium mine at Crystal Hills, about 100 mi (160 km) north of Los Angeles, and a railhead in Trona, California. This used petrol driven locomotives, and mounted the rail on a set of wooden A frames.
Suspended and bicycle railways
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