The world's oldest working monorail has hung over Wuppertal since 1901
Since 1901, trains in the German city of Wuppertal have dangled beneath a single overhead rail, making the Schwebebahn the oldest monorail still carrying passengers. The idea is older still: a Russian named Ivan Elmanov built a prototype in 1820. For most of two centuries, though, monorails stayed a curiosity rather than a commute.
Victorian inventors tried everything. A monorail was displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In Ireland, the French engineer Charles Lartigue built a line between Ballybunion and Listowel in 1888, with a load-bearing central rail and two lower rails for balance, cheap to build but awkward to run; it lasted 36 years. New Jersey had a monorail you rode by pedalling a matching bicycle, and in the early 1900s engineers tested cars balanced by gyroscopes that never got past the prototype stage.
The design that stuck emerged in the 1950s from the German firm ALWEG: rubber-tyred cars straddling a concrete or steel beam, one set of wheels carrying the weight and another steering. Hitachi and Bombardier, the two largest makers, both build on it. Disneyland opened America's first daily monorail in 1959, and exhibitions and theme parks promoted the trains as the future, yet cities mostly chose conventional rail.
Riding a beam has real advantages. Monorails never meet traffic lights, cars or pedestrians, cast a narrower shadow than old elevated railways, and can run quieter than diesel buses. On the other hand, they can cost more than surface light rail, need wider tunnels, and require complicated track switches. The word itself may trace to 1897, when the German engineer Eugen Langen described his suspended tramway as one-railed.
Japan became the stronghold: Tokyo Monorail has carried more than 1.5 billion passengers since 1964. The biggest system is now in Chongqing, where hills, mountains and rivers made tunnelling impractical, so in 2004 the city chose unusually wide monorail cars with heavy-rail capacity. Its Line 3 alone moves more than 680,000 people a day. The Monorail Society blames the 1993 Simpsons episode Marge vs. the Monorail for souring public opinion.
Source: Monorail
