Suspension railway

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, in England soon afterwards.

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.

[5][6] 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.

[citation needed] In March 1895, Russian engineer Ippolit Romanov (originally from Tbilisi, Georgia) built a prototype of an electric monorail in Odessa, modern-day Ukraine.

During the 1880s the German businessman and engineer Eugen Langen experimented in his Cologne sugar factory with a low one-track suspension railway system for the transportation of raw materials.

A cooperation between politicians and businessmen from the Barmen-Elberfeld industrial area around 1890 led to the implementation of an electric powered elevated railway system from the factory of Otto and Langen, now Deutz.

Aerorail of Texas and Sky Train of Florida were promoting steel-wheel versions of SAFEGE as well but both appear to have ceased trading without having installed a system.

[3] In 1956 Monorail, Incorporated built a short test track of their suspended system at Arrowhead Park in Houston, Texas.

Based on another new design using small capacity cars, the Jetrail system opened in 1970 at Dallas Love Field Airport taking passengers from a carpark to the terminal.

[citation needed] Two further H-Bahn suspension railways were built in Germany in 1975, at Dortmund University campus and Düsseldorf airport.

Officially closed in 2024, currently being dismantled Zhongtang Air Rail Technology Aside from a multitude of indoor uses in factories, suspended railways are also used for number of outdoor applications other than passenger transportation.

In the 1920s the Port of Hamburg used a petrol powered, suspended monorail to transport luggage and freight from ocean-going vessels to a passenger depot.

This significantly reduces cost and length of tunnels, by up to 60% in some cases, which otherwise must be at gentle gradients to suit road vehicles or conventional railways.

[32][33] A suspended monorail capable of carrying fully loaded 20' and 40' containers has been under construction since 2020 at the Port of Qingdao, the first phase of which was put into operation in 2021.