
The first 150 years of failures
Although the steam locomotive had already been invented by Richard Trevithick in 1802, the world’s first monorails were still horse-drawn. In 1820, Ivan Kirillovich Elmanov built a ‘road on poles’ in the village of Myachkovo near Moscow. The horse-drawn carriages travelled on an elevated track. One project envisaged using them to transport salt on Crimea. This was 17 years before the first steam locomotive ever came to Russia. Unfortunately, the project was cancelled due to a lack of investors.

At the same time, Henry Robinson Palmer (1795 – 1844) developed a monorail railway in England and patented it in 1821. The civil engineer had measured that a horse could only pull a small payload on the very uneven and dirty tracks of the time. His beams, which ran on pillars up to several metres above the irregular terrain and had a flat iron surface, allowed up to five times the transport capacity of a horse. Saddle-mounted wagons with freight containers hanging down on both sides of the rails created a low centre of gravity, the two wheels of a wagon had a flange on either side. The horse pulled them by a long rope, and steam locomotives were also considered. Swivelling track beams were provided for road crossings, and turnouts were also developed. And finally, the transfer of freight containers to a ship or horse-drawn vehicle, known today as combined transport, was also planned. The first Palmer monorail was built in Deptford Dockyard in London in 1824, and a further line was built in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, in 1825. It went down in history as the first monorail railway in the world to carry passengers. As early as 1826, the German railway pioneer Friedrich Harkort had a demonstration line of Palmer’s system built at his steel factory in Elberfeld (today part of Wuppertal), but objections prevented the construction of a public railway.

In 1872, a test section of a monorail railway called the Lyarsky system was exhibited at the Polytechnic Exhibition in Moscow. In 1874, a certain Khludov is said to have built a monorail line in Russia for transporting timber. In 1876, General Le-Roy Stone presented a steam-powered double-decker vehicle at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. In the same year, the 7-mile-long wooden Sonoma Prismoidal monorail was to connect the Californian town of Sonoma with the sea. Half of the line was built and despite low construction costs, the venture went bankrupt after six months. In 1878, a version of General Stone’s Centennial Monorail was put into operation on a 6.4 kilometre freight line between Bradford and Gilmore, Pennsylvania. Disaster struck on 27 January 1879 when the steam locomotive’s boiler exploded and the train plunged into a creek. The line was subsequently abandoned. In 1886, Captain J.V. Meig tested a railway line in the USA, but the design is said to have been so far ahead of its time that it never came to fruition. The first suspended railway, the Enos Electric Railway, was demonstrated in Greenville, New Jersey, in 1886. It was made of light, open steel rather than wooden beams, but no larger system was ever built. In 1888, the 14.5 kilometre Listowel & Ballybunion Railway was opened on steel rails in the west of Ireland. It operated until 1924 when it was closed due to rising operating costs and the rise of road transport. The engineer Ippolit Vladimirovitch Romanov had carried out initial experiments with his electric monorail in Odessa on the Black Sea in 1895. Romanov was already thinking about automatic driverless operation with block lines. The pilot line project was completed in the spring of 1900.

It then took almost eight decades from the first inventions of Elmanov and Palmer until the Wuppertal suspension railway, the suspended monorail by Eugen Langen (1833 – 1895), was successfully opened in 1901 as the world’s oldest railway still in operation today, with steel wheels on a steel rail. The company was able to benefit from the construction and vehicle technology with electric operation, which had developed considerably in the meantime. The design of the Enos Monorail from 1886 may have influenced Langen, as it bears a certain resemblance to the Wuppertal suspension railway in Germany.

In 1909, Louis Brennan presented the railway, which was kept upright by the gyroscopic effect, in England. At the same time, August Scherl presented a similar vehicle in Berlin. Cars of the Scherl and Brennan types were also demonstrated in Brooklyn. Construction of a gyroscope railway based on this principle began in Russia in 1912, but was discontinued in 1922 due to lack of funds. There was a monorail in Seattle in 1911.

At the same time, ideas for a means of transport levitating without contact using magnetic forces also emerged. In 1912, Emile Bachelet patented his ‘novel apparatus for transferring bodies at very high speed from one point to another’ in the USA. He built a first model in 1914. In 1911, Professor B.P. Weinberg from the Technical Institute in Tomsk, Russia, invented an electromagnetic levitation train driven by a linear synchronous electric motor. In the same year, Weinberg successfully built a test installation with a 10 kg carriage.

In 1914, the Telfer monorail operated in Genoa, which can be seen as the forerunner of the Alweg monorail developed decades later.
In the following decades, due to two World Wars, monorails became rather quiet.
In 1924, the Magnesium Monorail for freight transport was opened in California. While railway technology stagnated between the World Wars, the Scottish engineer George Bennie built the Bennie railway aeroplane with a demonstration track near Glasgow in 1929. With two electrically powered propellers, it accelerated to 160 km/h. Plans for a high-speed link between London and Paris across the English Channel were scuppered in the economic difficulties of the 1930s.

This was also the fate of Sevastian Sevastyanovich Waldner’s train based on this principle in the Soviet Union, which attracted a great deal of attention and was supposed to connect several Russian cities at speeds of up to 290 km/h, but was cancelled in 1936 despite successful model tests. In a paper published in 1934, the Russian space pioneer Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky considered the idea of a high-speed railway on air cushions travelling at speeds of up to 720 km/h. The idea was later abandoned in the 1960s. The idea was taken up again in the 1960s by Jean Bertin in France as the Aérotrain. He developed a track-guided hovercraft, built a model in 1963 and then two 6.7 km and 18 km long test tracks until 1969. The project was discontinued in 1977 in favour of the TGV.
At the end of the 1960s, Gerhard Müller developed the Aerobus in Switzerland, a so-called overground traffic system, a suspension railway on cable suspensions or rigid girders was to be used in the local transport of the future and a test facility was built. Various realisations around the world have disappeared again today.


A new start with Alweg
Most modern monorails today are based on the Alweg system, named after the first letters of the name of its initiator, the Swedish industrialist Dr Axel Lenard Wenner-Gren. In 1951, Wenner-Gren commissioned a group of German engineers in Cologne to develop a new transport system. His starting point was the fact that the existing means of transport were no longer able to meet the ever-increasing demand for transport economically. The Alweg Research Company, a working group of experienced professionals from the railway and aircraft industries, worked on the development of a monorail system based on older studies, which promised ground-breaking innovations in the transport sector. On 8 October 1952, the first test train was presented to the public on a reduced scale at the Fühlingen test site near Cologne. It took almost another five years before the first full-size train was presented at the same location on 23 July 1956. The Alweg system developed on the basis of this mandate has a structure consisting of beams with a rectangular cross-section, which simultaneously serve as track and carrier. The beam track can be laid on supports as an elevated track, as a surface track or as an underground track. In contrast to the many predecessors with steel wheels, pneumatic tyres have now been provided, which allow better acceleration and steeper ramps, serve as primary suspension and promise quiet running. The bogies of the vehicles with pneumatic tyres surround the beams in a saddle shape so that the carrying wheels roll on the upper surface and the guide and stabilising wheels roll on the two side surfaces of the beams. The electric drive with direct current is provided by a lateral conductor rail. Although the technology, including the test track, was developed in Germany, the concept did not catch on in Europe because of the visual intrusion into historic cityscapes, but above all because of the car euphoria that was setting in at the time.


And yet! Today, there are a wide variety of solutions based on this principle and its modifications, but they vary depending on the required transport capacity and speed and on the builder. In contrast to conventional railways, this makes the free choice of manufacturer more difficult when ordering additional and replacement vehicles.
The International Monorail Association
Founded in the Netherlands in 2010 and relocated to Switzerland in 2015, the International Monorail Association (IMA) is a non-profit organisation that focuses on grade-separated automated mass transit systems, regardless of their support, guidance and drive technology. This opens up a wide field for innovation. It aims to promote the responsible and efficient use of such railways in public transport and sees itself as a platform for dialogue between national, regional and local authorities, industry, construction companies, operators and maintenance companies, as well as engineering firms. To this end, its experts compile information, training and technical documentation. It currently consists of 39 members from Europe, America and Asia and has developed a 200-page performance specification for turnkey monorail systems as well as guidelines for their planning in order to provide municipal authorities, investors, transport companies and other stakeholders with tools and decision-making aids. Around 25 international IMA experts came together to develop this specification. It enables customers and users to specify a system for their specific transport needs, based on best practice and applying national and international regulations.

Under the leadership of its president Marko Krönke, head of a German consultancy firm, and its director Maxim Weidner at the manufacturer Derap in Switzerland, the IMA organises annual conferences under the name Monorailex to exchange experiences, as well as other meetings. Most of the manufacturers and suppliers of components are companies based in Europe. The basic technologies and many components originate from this continent. In contrast, however, very few monorails are in operation or planned in Europe. There are small and large monorails mainly in Asia, but also on the American continent and the world’s largest project is currently starting operation in Africa, namely in Cairo. At this year’s Monorailex, progress was reported in particular on the construction of straddled monorails (or saddle monorails, as opposed to suspended versions) with high transport capacity, which, like other high-capacity metros or suburban railways, can move over 25,000 passengers per hour and direction (PPHD).

Monorails on the rise
Around 100 monorails with a total length of 650 kilometres are currently in operation worldwide, and this figure is expected to rise to over 1000 km by 2025. However, they only represent a fraction of public transport systems. Almost 80 % are located in Asia. Europe follows North America with 7 % or around 56 km. More than half of the global route length is used for public transport, a good quarter as a feeder or terminal connection in the airport area. The remainder is used by tourist facilities and leisure parks. According to a study by SCI Verkehr, Hamburg, the market volume for construction, production and maintenance will be around 2 billion euros per year over the next 10 years, of which more than a third will be spent on maintenance. According to a study by Mordor Intelligence, Hyderabadii, the global market is expected to be worth between 5 and 6 billion euros. This may not seem much in view of the global market for local rail transport of around 25 billion euros, but the market volume is expected to increase considerably over the next few years. This is partly due to the short construction times and low construction costs compared to ground-level and underground systems.

Naturally, the applications and technologies used are diverse. Roughly speaking, there are straddled monorails, including maglevs, suspended monorails and theoretically also combined vertical and straddled monorails. At around 90 %, straddled monorails are in the majority. In contrast to the early monorails, such as Palmer’s or the Wuppertal suspension railway, whose metal wheels ran on metal rails, today almost exclusively pneumatic tyres are used for the carrying and guiding function. The higher static friction allows greater gradients, usually around 6 to 7 %, but also up to around 12 %. As the tyres serve as the primary suspension, a single-stage suspension is sufficient. Metal wheel/rail interfaces often generate considerable noise pollution and vibrations on the surrounding buildings, which is not the case with pneumatic tyres. On the other hand, the higher rolling resistance of the tyres requires more traction energy. Monorails are generally completely separated from other traffic and therefore run autonomously with a GoA4 degree of automation without an attendant.


Further reading:
International Monorail Association IMA: https://monorailex.org
неизвестны отеч ественный монорельс (Die unbekannte inländische [russische] Einschienenbahn): https://www.izmerov.narod.ru/monor/index.html
Monorail History, The Monorail Society: https://www.monorails.org/tMspages/History.html
17.01.2025