Paper 2: Monorails

Abstract

The authors define the monorail as a transport system which does not depend on width of track (e.g. rail gauge) to keep the vehicles upright. Two basic types have been developed, namely (1) the ‘supported’ type where the car rides on a narrow beam and is kept upright by wheels running on the side of the beam, and (2) the ‘suspended’ type where the beam is hollow with a continuous slot on the underside allowing the cars to be suspended from a driving trolley running inside the beam.

There are only two monorails at present operating full-scale passenger service, namely one of the suspended type, sixty years old, in Wuppertal, Germany, and one of the supported type, two years old, in Tokyo. The paper includes engineering details of the latter, and briefly describes a modern version of the suspended type.

The authors suggest that the likely future for monorails is in urban–suburban passenger transport where right-of-way problems make surface lines impracticable (and motor transport is no solution). Proposals for such monorails, however, still have to compete with ‘conventional rail’ which can, of course, also be constructed overhead and has advantages wherever the system is to be at grade or in tunnel.