Rohr ROMAG

ROMAG was a personal rapid transit (PRT) system produced by the American company Rohr, Inc. It featured a linear induction motor that was arranged to provide both traction and suspension in a magnetic levitation system.

ROMAG was developed from a wheeled system known as Monocab, originally designed by Edward Haltom and built to the extent of a test track by Vero Inc. in 1969. Rohr bought the design from Vero and converted it to the ROMAG, opening their own test track at their Chula Vista, California, plants in 1971. The Vero test system was later used as a display unit at Transpo '72.

ROMAG was considered for use in Toronto's GO-Urban project, but lost to the very similar Krauss-Maffei Transurban. It was then selected for a deployment in Las Vegas, but funding fell through and planning stopped. Rohr abandoned development after the erased half of their corporate value and they returned to their core aviation interests. Boeing Vertol purchased the design from Rohr in 1978, but no deployments were ever carried out.

Monocab is one of the earliest PRT designs, dating from 1953. It was originally developed by Edward Haltom who was studying monorail systems. Haltom noticed that the time to start and stop a conventional large monorail train, like those of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, meant that a single line could only support between 20 and 40 vehicles an hour. In order to get reasonable passenger movements on such a system, the trains had to be large enough to carry hundreds of passengers (see headway for a general discussion). This, in turn, demanded large guideways that could support the weight of these large vehicles, driving up capital costs to the point where he considered them unattractive.

Haltom turned his attention to developing a system that could operate with shorter timings, thereby allowing the individual cars to be smaller while preserving the same overall route capacity. Smaller cars would mean less weight at any given point, which meant smaller and less expensive guideways. To eliminate the backup at stations, the system used "offline" stations that allowed the mainline traffic to bypass the stopped vehicles. He designed the Monocab system using six-passenger cars suspended on wheels from an overhead guideway. Like most suspended systems, it suffered from the problem of difficult switching arrangements; since the car rode on a rail, switching from one path to another required the rail to be moved, a slow process that limited the possible headways.

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