The most famous Lartigue railway was the Listowel and Ballybunion Railway in Ireland.
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Lartigue had seen camels in Algeria carrying heavy loads balanced in panniers on their backs. This inspired him to design a new type of railway. Instead of the conventional two parallel rails on the ground, it had a single rail sitting above the sand and held at waist height on A-shaped trestles. The carriages sat astride the trestles like panniers.
By 1881 Lartigue had built a 90 km monorail to transport esparto grass across the Algerian desert, with mules pulling trains of panniers that straddled the elevated rail.
However the Lartigue system as built was not truly a monorail, since it was necessary to add two further rails on each side, lower down the A frames. These did not carry any weight, but unpowered stabilising wheels fitted to all the engines and wagons contacted these extra rails to prevent the vehicles from overbalancing.