Lartigue Monorail

The Lartigue Monorail system was developed by the French engineer Charles Lartigue (1834–1907). He developed a horse drawn monorail system invented by Henry Robinson Palmer in 1821 further.


The most famous Lartigue railway was the Listowel and Ballybunion Railway in Ireland.


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.