Lartigue Monorail
type of monorail, named after its inventor Charles Lartigue
The Lartigue Monorail system was developed by the French engineer Charles Lartigue (1834–1907). He further developed a horse drawn monorail system, which had been invented by Henry Robinson Palmer in 1821.
Lartigue had seen camels in Algeria carrying heavy loads balanced in panniers on their backs. This inspired him to design a new type of railway. Instead of the conventional two parallel rails on the ground, it had a single rail sitting above the sand and held at waist height on A-shaped trestles. The carriages sat astride the trestles like panniers.
The most famous Lartigue railway was the Listowel and Ballybunion Railway in Ireland which ran for 36 years from 1888.
Despite how it is referred to, the Lartigue system was not truly a monorail, since it was necessary to add two further rails, one on each side, lower down the A frames. These did not carry any weight, but unpowered stabilising wheels fitted to all the engines and wagons contacted these extra rails to prevent the vehicles from overbalancing.
Listowel and Ballybunion Railway
This was a 14.4 km (8.9 mi) monorail built on the Lartigue principle in County Kerry in Ireland.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lartigue Monorail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.