Suspension railway

A suspension railway is a form of elevated monorail where the vehicle is suspended from a fixed track (as opposed to a cable used in aerial tramways), which is built above street level, over a river or canal, or an existing railway track.

The British engineer Henry Robinson Palmer (1795–1844) filed a patent application for a horse-drawn suspended single-rail system in 1821, and constructed a demonstration at Woolwich Arsenal soon afterwards.

German industrial pioneer, thinker and politician Friedrich Harkort built a demonstration track of Palmers' system in 1826, in Elberfeld, Germany, at the time commercial centre of the early industrial area Wupper Valley. The steelmill owner had the vision of a coal-carrier railway between Wupper Valley and the nearby coal-mining region of Ruhr, which would connect his own factories in Elberfeld and Deilbachtal. Due to protests from mill owners that were not integrated along the line and from the transporting branch, this idea could not be executed.

The first suspended railway was opened at Cheshunt on June 25, 1825 using Palmer's patent. It was actually built to carry bricks, but as an opening stunt it carried passengers, in doing so writing monorail history.

A work, Description of the suspension railway invented by Maxwell Dick: with engravings By Maxwell Dick, published in Irvine, Scotland in 1830, refers to an Aerial tramway/cable car system.

The Enos Electric Railway, an electric powered monorail with wagons suspended from an elevated frame of open steelwork, was demonstrated in the grounds of the Daft Electric Company in Greenville, New Jersey in 1886. It was built out of lightweight steel construction and worked well, but was never expanded.

The design of the rail-frame appears to have influenced Eugen Langen, as his Wuppertal Schwebebahn framing bears a remarkable likeness to the Enos construction.

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