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Early Developments
The earliest patent for a vehicle designed to run on a single rail can be traced to UK patent No 4618 dated 22nd 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. Lines were built in 1824 and 1825, and 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 coule be built at ground level in or alongside of roads. Two lines were built in India on the principle that he described.
In 1869, J Haddon built a monorail in Syria to replace a mule train. This embodied lateral guide rails, but was basically a pannier design hauled by a locomotive having double vertical steam boilers.
By the end of the 19th Century, the main protagonists for the monorail where 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.
The last Lartigue design was built in 1924 between a magnesium mine at Crystal Hills, about 100 miles 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
In 1887, the Enos Electric Company erected a suspended monorail in New Jersey, which was closer in its appearance to more modern monorails, but the most famous suspended monorail of this era was Eugen Langen's 'Schwebebahn', or floating railway, of Wuppertal, which entered service in 1901, and is still in daily use.
The Wuppertal monorail follows the Wupper Valley where a conventional railway is quite impractical. The suspended monorail, like the Palmer monorail appears a potentially superior solution over rough and mountainous terrain, but since the majority of the track is over more favourable territory, it only rarely offers an overall better solution. Short sections in mountainous areas, such as a system built for the Ria Copper Co. by Siemens in the Pyrenees, seem to be the niche for this type of monorail. This particular example used a form of regenerative braking, such that the electricity generated by the full descending trucks was sufficient to drive the empty trucks back up the mountain.
A propeller-driven suspended monorail, claiming the speed of aircraft with the safety and reliability of railways was designed by George Bennie in 1926, and named the 'Bennie Railplane'. A demonstrator was built near Glasgow in 1929, but the system did not progress further.
In 1892 the Boynton Bicycle Railway was built in Long Island. Designed by Jose Ramon Villalon, who would go on become one of Cuba's greatest statesmen, this railroad ran on a single rail at ground level, but with an overhead stabilising rail engaged by a pair of horizontally opposed wheels. The railway operated for only two years, but the design was adopted elsewhere.
In 1908, Elfric Wells Chalmers Kearney (1881-1960)[1] designed a monorail having an overhead stabilizing rail with sprung-loaded vertical stabilizing wheels, but although a car was built, it never saw service.
From 1910–1914 a monorail system designed by Howard H Tunis was used on the Pelham Park and City Island Railroad in the Bronx, New York City. A disastrous derailment on June 16th 1910 led to the line going out of business.
The Gyro Monorail
Perhaps the only true monorail was the Gyro Monorail developed independently by Louis Brennan, August Scherl and Piotr Schilovski. This was a true single track train which used a gyroscope-based balancing system to remain upright. All were demonstrated by full scale prototypes, but development was effectively stopped by the First World War. Brennan's design was given serious consideration for the North-West Frontier of India, and a Schilovski monorail was proposed by the USSR government between Leningrad and Tsarskoye Selo in 1921.[2] Considering the volatility of the regime at that time, it is not surprising that funds ran out shortly after construction began.
The 'Modern' Era
The vehicles referenced above are now little more than historical curiosities. The advantage of the monorail of crossing rough mountainous terrain was relevant to the time of expansion of railway networks over virgin country, and in most cases the conventional railway proved the more appropriate solution, except for a few niches. Monorail tracks were rarely longer than 60 miles, and usually considerably shorter. The motor road vehicle finally displaced the monorail from its few niche applications.
Wheel on steel characterised monorails of this early era, just as it does conventional railways, although some bicycle railways could react against the stabilizing rail to increase adhesion, improving acceleration, braking and hill climbing.
By 1910 conventional railways discovered the hunting oscillation, which appeared to impose an upper bound on performance, indicating that a monorail solution would be required, if speeds were to be increased significantly. The problem was analysed theoretically by 1928, but actual remedial measures were not introduced into suspension design until the 1960s. However, wheel profiles which yield high hunting speeds tend to require straight and level track, with radii of curvature of about 7km. Existing track, built to accommodate steam trains, is not adequate, and new routes are required. The principal argument in favour of the conventional railway i.e. its compatibility with existing infrastructure, ceases to be valid. The economic argument in favour of building new routes, when most railways only survive through public subsidy is weak, to say the least.
The time since the Second World War has been characterised by a massive expansion of road and air transport at the expense of rail. Under such circumstances, it should not be surprising that marginal rail projects, such as monorails, would be the first to be abandoned.
However, it is the development of automotive technology which has given rise to a new class of monorail, which owes little to the work of Palmer and Lartigue. These vehicles are suspended from or straddle concrete beams, and use pneumatic tyres to improve adhesion and reduce noise compared with wheel on steel. They have more in common with guided buses than conventional railways. The beam is less obtrusive than an overhead roadway or railway, and the modern designs may have a niche in dealing with right of way problems in congested city centres, at lower cost compared with tunneling.
References
- Barton H H C Monorails, Institution of Loco Engineers, 6th February 1962
- Wheatcroft E L E, Woodhouse LC Monorails, Proc. Inst Mech Eng Vol 181, 1967.
- Cousins H The Stability of Gyroscopic Single Track Vehicles. Engineering, Nov 21, Nov 28, Dec 12 1913
- Carter F W On the Stability of Running of Locomotives, Proc. Royal Society July 1928
- Wickens A H The Dynamics of Railway Vehicles on Straight Track: Fundamental Considerations of Lateral Stability. Proc. Inst. Mech Eng. Vol 180,1966.
Footnotes
- ^ Badsey-Ellis, Antony (2005). London's Lost Tube Schemes. Harrow: Capital Transport, 320. ISBN 185414 293 3.p257
- ^ Self, Douglas (20 July 2004). "The Schilovski Gyrocar". Douglas Self. Retrieved on 2006-12-23.
See Also
