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Lartigue Monorail


The Lartigue Monorail system was developed by the French engineer Charles Lartigue (1834–1907). He developed a horse drawn monorail system invented by Henry Robinson Palmer in 1821 further.

The most famous Lartigue railway was the Listowel and Ballybunion Railway in Ireland.

Another line, 17 km (11 mi) long, was built in 1895 between Feurs and Panissières, in the French département of Loire.

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.

By 1881 Lartigue had built a 90 km (56 mi) monorail to transport esparto grass across the Algerian desert, with mules pulling trains of panniers that straddled the elevated rail.

However the Lartigue system as built 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.

This was a 14.4 km (8.9 mi) monorail built on the Lartigue principle in County Kerry in Ireland. It linked Listowel and Ballybunion, and opened on 29 February 1888.

The locomotives were of the 0-6-0 type (strictly speaking, 0-3-0), constructed by the Hunslet Engine Company. They were specially built with two boilers to balance on the track, and consequently two fireboxes, one of which had to be stoked by the driver. They were also fitted with powered tenders for auxiliary use on hills. The tender wheels were driven by two cylinders via spur gears. Two small chimneys were fitted to each tender to discharge the exhaust steam from these cylinders. A smaller engine, nicknamed the "coffee pot", was used in the construction of the railway, having been used previously on a demonstration line at Tothill Fields in London. It can be seen on an early photo of 1888.


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