Suspended and Bicycle Railways
In 1886, the Enos Electric Company demonstrated a suspended monorail on the grounds of the Daft Electric Light Company in the Greenville section of Jersey City, 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.
In 1892 the Boynton Bicycle Railway was built in Long Island. Designed by Jose Ramon Villalon, who would later 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) designed a monorail having an overhead stabilizing rail with spring-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 16, 1910 led to the line going out of business.
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 the UK.
Russia worked on a system similar to the Bennie Railplane in the 1930s are were even planning a 332 mile line through Turkestan and have a top speed of 180mph. Their system was unique in it had two side by side cars suspended on one rail, and it could actually dismount from the rail to cross rivers as an amphibian and then on the other side remount the rail. And while elements of this system were tested in Moscow, the Russian government instead built a conventional rail system.
Read more about this topic: Monorail History
Famous quotes containing the words suspended and, suspended, bicycle and/or railways:
“Death does determine life.... Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death.”
—Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975)
“The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)