Monorails

It was during the period before the First World War that monorails first caught public attention, although as early as 1824, H.R.Palmer had proposed a monorail in which divided vehicles would hang down either side of a single rail supported on trestles. An experimental horse-powered line was built, without lasting effect. About 1880, however, the French engineer C.F.M.T.Lartigue built about 190km (120 miles) of similar lines in North Africa along which wagons which hung down either side of the rail like panniers were hauled by horses or mules. The system was demonstrated in London in 1886, but with a steam locomotive designed by Mallet: it had a pair of vertical boilers and two grooved wheels. This led to construction of the 15km (9 miles) Lartigue monorail Listowel & Ballybunion Railway in Ireland, cheap to build, opened in 1888, steam worked, and successful in operation until 1924.

The managing director of the Lartigue Railway Construction Company was F. B.Behr who developed a high-speed electrically powered monorail, demonstrated in Belgium at 132kph (82mph) in 1897. He promoted a company which was authorized in 1901 to build such a line between Liverpool and Manchester, upon which the cars were to travel at 175kph (109mph): but the Board of Trade was hesitant over their braking abilities and capital for construction could not be raised. It was at this period, however, that the Wuppertal Schwebebahn was built in Germany, an overhead monorail with electrically powered cars suspended from it. The first section was opened to traffic in 1901; the line eventually extended to some 13km (8 miles) and continues to operate successfully to the present day. In 1903, Louis Brennan patented a monorail system in which the cars would run on a single rail and use gyroscopes to maintain their stability; this was built and demonstrated in 1909 with a petrol-electric vehicle, but despite the attraction of cheap construction was never put into commercial use. There have been many subsequent proposals for monorails, some of which have been built. The Bennie monorail, in which a suspended car was driven by an airscrew, was demonstrated in the 1920s; the most notable of many systems proposed since the Second World War has been the Alweg system in which the track is a hollow concrete beam supported on concrete pylons; not strictly a monorail, for a narrow track on the top of the beam is used for the carrying wheels of the vehicles, while additional wheels bearing on the edges of the beam cater for side thrust. With the exception of the Wuppertal line, monorails and the like have seen little use in public service, and have always had greater success in exciting public imagination.