Tube, Train, Tram, and Car; or, Up-to-date locomotion. Arthur H. Beavan
Table of Contents
A ONE-RAIL railway! What kind of novelty can that be, emanating no doubt from the prolific brain of some enthusiastic engineer possessed with an idea, a fad, a craze—call it what you will! We are accustomed to highly respectable trains running in an orthodox manner on double rails. A projected, many-railed track we have also heard of to carry ships bodily across the Isthmus of Panama. But the idea of a single-rail “Flying Dutchman” or “Wild Irishman” seems chimerical.
It is not so, however, and the system has been solemnly and deliberately sanctioned by Act of Parliament.
Nowadays one need not be astonished at anything. Take cycling, for instance. Long ago, when velocipedes—three or four-wheeled, uncanny machines—were mere toys wherewith youths loved to dislocate their joints on the lower terraces of the Crystal Palace, no one dreamt that bicycles, outraging all the laws of gravitation and practically mono-wheeled, would ere long be used on road and field and moor, on mountain-side, on steppe and desert, over barren Asiatic tundras and snow-clad Yukon plains—in short, wherever adventurous mankind has penetrated.
The mono-rail train, like a bicycle, runs on one linear track, but, unlike that hopelessly collapsible machine, requires no balancing, and cannot capsize, and under proper conditions is the safest known method of travelling at very great speed.
“Faire prose sans le savoir” is a familiar aphorism of Molière, but perhaps it would astonish most of us to be calmly told by modern engineers that all our lives we have, without knowing it, been travelling on mono-railways! They assert that although it is true that the ordinary engine with its coaches rests on a pair of rails, the fact that the space between the rails is cut away is immaterial, as it is rendered a single track by the rigidity of the carriage axles, and if these were loose, of course the train would overturn.
Nature has no example of mono-railwayism (to coin an expression), unless it be the gossamer or shooting spider, that upon a single invisible thread spun from its body ascends to aerial heights on a kind of self-manufactured mono-rail, Dame Nature being too lavish and too wise, in the perfect freedom she accords to birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, to restrict their movements to one undeviating path.
In the moral world there have always been mono-railists, men of one fixed idea, from which they could not, or would not, budge—apostles of an ambition, a creed, a theory, a political conviction. The world has had its Alexander the Great, its Napoleon, Buddha, St. Paul, Mahomet, Martin Luther, Ignatius Loyola, Wycliffe, its Palissy, George Stephenson, Mungo Park, John Bright, and Cobden.
It has been left to the inventive mechanical genius of the nineteenth century to develop the mono-rail system. Doubtless those inscrutable people, the Chinese, knew of it, and applied it in some way long ago; and perhaps the yet more mysterious dwellers in ancient Egypt—whence all wisdom seems to have descended—utilised it after some unknown fashion.
Blondin, in his marvellous feat of trundling a wheel-barrow containing a man along the high-level rope, used a hempen mono-rail; and the wire cables stretching across the Thames at the reconstructed bridges at Kew and Vauxhall, acting as travelling ways to convey the excavated soil from the coffer-dams in large iron “skips” or buckets, were another species of mono-rail; while at home in brickfields, and in mines, and on plantations in distant lands, miniature railways have been used for years to carry clay, ore, and produce, over plain and hill and dale.
In India a peculiar kind of tramway truck has been in use for some time, with two or three flanged wheels which run on a single rail, and a large balance-wheel on one side of the truck to prevent it toppling over. Produce of all kinds can easily be drawn upon it by a couple of coolies, and its efficiency on country roads has been highly spoken of.
Germany presents us with a recent and curious example of the application of the principle to locomotion. In the Wupper Valley near Dusseldorf and Cologne there are two towns, Barmen and Elberfeld, about eight miles apart, mutually engaged in chemical and textile industries, and this separation of the sister-towns was an obvious disadvantage to both. But now they are joined by a wonderful railway, constructed on an elevated line running six miles of its course above the River Wupper, a tributary of the Rhine, some sixty to a hundred feet wide. The carriages are suspended, and work upon a single rail, a development of the travelling cable-way system. This rail is rigidly fastened to an iron framework of girders, and supports the cars hanging therefrom by means of two steel “bogies” with two wheels. Thus they can pass round sharp curves without slackening speed and with the greatest safety, its motive power, electricity, being applied by two motors on each carriage which drive both wheels with equal force at a speed fixed at thirty-one miles an hour, and attainable fifteen seconds after starting.
As elevated railways of this type are somewhat costly, and a simpler and cheaper form would be a desideratum, a short line across country was built as an experiment at Cologne-Deutz. The stays, measuring from 9·6 feet to 28·5 feet, were made either of wood, or of iron tubes, and met at the top in a cap, from which was jointed the sheet-iron supports that carried the mono-rail. By means of this jointed connection, the strain was always of a central character, and, therefore, more easily borne. At intervals of about 660 feet a couple of stays were firmly braced together, in order to give stability to the overhead structure and to take up the longitudinal thrust. In consequence, even with light locomotives, the traction power was very high, and on the line at Deutz it was found that a locomotive drawing two carriages full of passengers could ascend a gradient of 1 in 6 with perfect safety.
But a means of adapting a mono-rail to every condition had some time before been thought out. In 1883–4 Charles Lartigue, the eminent French engineer, developing the principle conceived by the great Telford, constructed some small lines in Tunis and Algeria for carrying esparto grass. The cars were drawn by animals in a special form of mono-rail, the model upon which Mr. F. B. Behr, ASS. INST. C.E.—who modestly disclaims all originality in the matter—has worked for years, greatly improving in practical details the original design, and constructing for the first time mono-rail trains that have been successful in the carriage of both goods and passengers by steam and electricity.
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