Who Invented the Hanging Monorail?

Henry Robinson Palmer  

Have you ever seen a hanging railway system? If you live in Germany or Japan this will come as no surprise but when did this all start? Well technically in Cheshunt England in 1825 the first suspended railway opened which was designed to carry bricks but as an opening stunt they used passengers. Since selfies weren’t that big back then and we’ll have to imagine what this looked like we’ll move on to the electric railway that opened in 1901. The combination of a German businessman with a sugar factory his business partner Nicolaus Otto the inventor of the internal combustion engine resulted in a new transportation system that allowed easy transport to their factories. This railway still exists today and was extended in 1903 to it’s final length of 8.3 miles or 13.3 km. Today it transports over 20 million passengers a year. Not a true hanging monorail the George Bennie railplane from the late 1920’s was an invention of a propeller-powered railcar that was suspended both on the bottom and on top that would be suspended above existing railroad tracks. A test track was constructed in Glasgow only being 130 yards or 129 meters which allowed them to test the prototype but not it’s top speed. Bennie estimated it to be able to go 120 mph or 193 km/h at full speed. There was a proposal to connect London and Glasgow with a railplane but after years of promoting his idea and investors worried about how this might take away profits from the railroad itself it never went past the prototype phase after George Bennie went bankrupt. I the late 1940s a french bridge builder became interested in George Bennie’s railplane and developed a new type of monorail with rubber tires that received no interest from the French government. Who it did receive interest from is Japan. In the 1970s Japan built multiple lines using this technology. This should come as no surprise to the rest of us as Japan is always in the future. The suspended monorail in both Kamakura and Fujisawa in Kanagawa prefecture japan were the first of their kind and are used by commuters that work in Yokohama and Tokyo or tourists visiting Enoshima. These hanging monorails have been popping up in other places such as the Memphis suspension railway and in Goa, India the Skybus metro a suspended prototype railway on a 1-mile track was being tested until an employee was killed. The project was halted in 2004 and ended in 2013 with the track being dismantled. How do you feel about a suspended railway vs the elevated one such as the Skytrain in Vancouver? Now for this episode’s riddle, the previous one was a clock. See if you can get this one.