(1909) by Brennan and Scherl
Early years The first monorail prototype was made in Russia in 1820 by
Ivan Elmanov. Attempts at creating monorail alternatives to conventional
railroads have been made since the early part of the 19th century. The
Centennial Monorail was featured at the
Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Based on its design the
Bradford and Foster Brook Railway was built in 1877 and ran for one year from January 1878 until January 1879. Around 1879 a "one-rail" system was proposed independently by Haddon and by Stringfellow, which used an inverted "V" rail (and thus shaped like "Λ" in cross-section). It was intended for military use, but was also seen to have civilian use as a "cheap railway". Similarly, one of the first systems put into practical use was that of French engineer Charles Lartigue, who built a line between
Ballybunion and Listowel in Ireland, opened in 1888 and lasting 36 years, being closed in 1924 (due to damage from Ireland's Civil War). It used a load-bearing single rail and two lower, external rails for balance, the three carried on triangular supports. It was cheap to construct but tricky to operate. Possibly the first monorail locomotive was a
0-3-0 steam locomotive on this line. A high-speed monorail using the
Lartigue system was proposed in 1901 between Liverpool and Manchester. The
Boynton Bicycle Railroad was a steam-powered monorail in
Brooklyn on
Long Island,
New York. It ran on a single load-bearing rail at ground level, but with a wooden overhead stabilizing rail engaged by a pair of horizontally opposed wheels. The railroad operated for only two years beginning in 1890. The
Hotchkiss Bicycle Railroad was a monorail on which a matching pedal
bicycle could be ridden. The first example was built between
Smithville and
Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1892. It closed in 1897. Other examples were built in
Norfolk from 1895 to 1909,
Great Yarmouth, and
Blackpool, UK, from 1896.
1900s–1950s Early designs used a double-
flanged single metal rail alternative to the double rail of conventional railways, both guiding and supporting the monorail car. A surviving suspended version is the oldest system still in service: the
Wuppertal monorail in Germany. Also in the early 1900s,
gyro monorails with cars gyroscopically balanced on top of a single rail were tested, but never developed beyond the prototype stage. The
Ewing System, used in the
Patiala State Monorail Trainways in
Punjab, India, relies on a hybrid model with a load-bearing single rail and an external wheel for balance. A high-speed monorail using the
Lartigue system was proposed in 1901 between Liverpool and Manchester. In June 1920, the French Patent Office published FR 503782, by Henri Coanda, on a "Transporteur Aérien" (Air Carrier). One of the first monorails planned in the United States was in New York City in the early 1930s, scrubbed for an elevated train system. File:Xlg russian monorail.jpg|thumb|300px|"Popular Science" February 1934, p. 41: "A new Russian type of monorail that runs in a chute on large spheres." The first half of the 20th century saw many further proposed designs that either never left the drawing board or remained short-lived prototypes. Another project created on the layout was the ball-bearing train by Nikolai Grigorievich Yarmolchuk. This train moved on spherical wheels with electric motors embedded in them, which were located in semi-circular chutes under a wooden platform (in the full-scale project the trestle would have been concrete). A model train, built to 1/5 scale to test the vehicle concept, was capable of reaching speeds of up to 70 km/h. The full-scale project was expected to reach speeds of up to 300 km/h.
1950s–1980s , built in 1962 and still using the original ALWEG trains In the latter half of the 20th century, monorails had settled on using larger beam- or girder-based track, with vehicles supported by one set of wheels and guided by another. In the 1950s, a 40% scale prototype of a system designed for speed of on straight stretches and on curves was built in Germany. There were designs with vehicles supported, suspended, or cantilevered from the beams. In the 1950s the
ALWEG straddle design emerged, followed by an updated suspended type, the
SAFEGE system. Versions of ALWEG's technology are used by the two largest monorail manufacturers,
Hitachi Monorail and
Bombardier. , with the additional car to make it a Mark II, as seen at the
Disneyland Hotel station in August 1963 In 1956, the first monorail to operate in the US began test operations in Houston, Texas.
Disneyland in
Anaheim, California, opened the United States' first daily operating
monorail system in 1959. Later during this period, additional
monorails were installed at
Walt Disney World in
Florida,
Seattle, and in
Japan. Monorails were promoted as futuristic technology with exhibition installations and amusement park purchases, as seen by the legacy systems in use today. However, monorails gained little foothold compared to conventional transport systems. In March 1972, Alejandro Goicoechea-Omar had patent DE1755198 published, on a "Vertebrate Train", built as an experimental track in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Niche private enterprise uses for monorails emerged, with the emergence of
air travel and
shopping malls, with shuttle-type systems being built.
1980s–present in Rust, Germany From the 1980s, most monorail mass transit systems have been in
Japan, with a few exceptions.
Tokyo Monorail is one of the world's busiest, averaging 127,000 passengers per day and having served over 1.5 billion passengers since 1964. China began development of monorails in the late 2000s and is already home to the world's largest and busiest monorail system, with mass transit monorails under construction in several cities. A
Bombardier Innovia Monorail-based system is under construction in
Wuhu, and several "Cloudrail" systems developed by
BYD are under construction in cities such as
Guang'an,
Liuzhou,
Bengbu, and
Guilin. Monorails have seen continuing use in niche shuttle markets and amusement parks. Modern mass transit monorail systems use developments of the ALWEG beam and tire approach, with only two suspended types in large use. Monorail configurations have also been adopted by
maglev trains. Since the 2000s, with the rise of traffic congestion and urbanization, there has been a resurgence of interest in the technology for
public transport, with a number of cities such as
Malta and
Istanbul investigating monorails as a possible mass transit solution. In 2004,
Chongqing Rail Transit in
China adopted a unique ALWEG-based design with rolling stock that is much wider than most monorails, with capacity comparable to
heavy rail. This is because
Chongqing is criss-crossed by numerous hills, mountains, and rivers, making tunneling infeasible except in some cases (for example, lines
1 and
6) due to the extreme depth involved. Today it is the largest and busiest monorail system in the world. In July 2009, two
Walt Disney World monorails collided, killing one of the drivers and injuring seven passengers. The
National Transportation Safety Board found the cause of the accident to be human error by both the driver and controller, contributed to by a lack of standard operating procedures.
São Paulo, Brazil, is building two high-capacity monorail lines as part of its public transportation network.
Line 15 was partially opened in 2014, will be long when completed and has a capacity of 40,000
pphpd using
Bombardier Innovia Monorail trains.
Line 17 will be long and is using the
BYD SkyRail design. Other significant monorail systems are under construction, including two lines for the
Cairo Monorail, two lines for the
MRT (Bangkok), and the
SkyRail Bahia in
Brazil. ==Types and technical aspects==