historyLibrary of Congress: Inside Adams1876 · Philadelphia, USA
The Centennial Monorail: America’s Highway in the Sky
At the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, General Roy Stone built a 500-foot elevated railway, sometimes called the Centennial Monorail. A single steam locomotive pushed and pulled one double-decker car that rode on a central load-bearing rail, with two guide rails below to keep it balanced. Passengers paid 3 cents for a two-minute trip. Nicknamed the one-legged railroad, it ran for the whole six-month exhibition without a recorded incident. The system connected the Agricultural and Horticultural Halls, which the exhibition's main train could not reach. Stone had no previous railroad or engineering experience when he applied for his patent.
The car sits on top of one central load-bearing rail, and it straddles two guide rails placed below and to either side. The guide rails stop the car from tipping sideways, so the car stays balanced even though it has only one main support. A steam locomotive pushed and pulled the car along the track.
The exhibition's elevated railway shows an early attempt to solve crowd transport with a single rail, an idea that later reappeared in monorails around the world. It is a good example of how world fairs served as testing grounds for new transport technology.
Roy Stone was a brevet brigadier general in the Civil War before turning to engineering.
background
A monorail is a form of urban rail transit in which trains run on or are suspended from a single rail or beam. Monorails typically provide intermediate transport capacity, generally greater than trams and less than heavy metro systems. The term is often applied colloquially to any elevated rail or people mover, though it refers more precisely to the single-beam track structure.
Two principal types exist: straddle-beam monorails, in which vehicles ride atop a concrete or steel beam, and suspended monorails, in which vehicles hang beneath the guideway. The straddle-beam design, descended from the ALWEG system of the 1950s, dominates modern installations; suspended systems remain in service on the Wuppertal Schwebebahn (1901, the oldest monorail in operation) and the Chiba Urban Monorail (the largest suspended network). Monorail systems are most frequently implemented in large cities, airports, and theme parks.
From Wikipedia: Monorail (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗ · text CC BY-SA 4.0
