Monorail

[tomikawaTT]

Thought about, but never built.

You realize that monorails come in several different flavors:

• Suspended.  The cars hang from a wheeled carriage riding a rail above them.
• Top-and-bottom.  The cars are carried on a single rail centered below them, but are balanced by a single rail centered above them, with double-flanged wheels both above and below.
• Wide straddle (Alweg).  The cars ride on a wide-topped beam, frequently on rubber tires, guided by smaller wheels bearing against the sides of the beam.  From Disneyland to Sin City, this is the currently preferred design for people-movers.
• Narrow straddle (Listowel and Ballybunion).  Three standard T-section rails supported on a trestle with A-frame bents.  Motive power and cars sit on the structure like saddlebags on a motorcycle, weight on the single top rail, balancing wheels riding the side rails.

The one I was thinking about would have been a narrow straddle type, loosely based on a mineral tram that ran in the Mojave Desert a century or so ago.  (The prototype didn't do anything a cableway couldn't have done - but cableways 40 miles long are somewhat impractical.)  It's still on my list of, 'someday, maybe,' projects - a couple of lines below the operating TBM eating its way through Haruyama (the mountain, not the station named after it.)

Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - when TBM's were a brand new idea)

[Anonymous]

Has anyone ever built a Monorail on there layout?