With the onset of the scientific and technological revolution, transport began to develop by leaps and bounds. Therefore, it does not seem surprising that almost immediately after the appearance of the railway in its traditional form, a monorail began to be built in a number of countries. And it spread throughout the world rapidly. A hundred years ago, it was considered almost the most promising type of transport, which in the future will be at every step. However, everything turned out to be not as rosy as it seemed at the beginning of the last century, and today monorail roads turned out to be a relic of the past, which is hardly remembered anymore.
Today, only a memory remains of most monorails.
The history of the emergence and development of the monorail is interesting, first of all, because literally from the moment of its appearance, they began to be built in a number of countries simultaneously, but independently of each other. So it was with the very first projects. And although officially the palm in the development of a monorail road has long been assigned to the British, in fact, the progenitor of this transport appeared, oddly enough, in Russia.
It was like this: in 1820, an engineer from the village of Myachkovo near Moscow named Ivan Elmanov invented and rebuilt the so-called "Road on pillars". It was a horse-drawn trolley that rolled along a longitudinal beam. There is also another description of the Elmanovskaya road: trolleys were hung from a beam, and horses, in turn, were pulled from the ground. The forerunner of the monorail was several sazhens long. And although the road was practically not used, and besides, it quickly fell into oblivion, it is it that is considered the world's first prototype monorail.
Prospective view of Ivan Elmanov's monorail.
But in Great Britain, the monorail was designed in 1821 by Henry Robinson Palmer, and, despite the fact that the Briton had no idea about the "Pole Road", both designs had a number of similar features. In 1822, the developer received a patent for his single-rail track, and the project was implemented three years later as the Cheshuntsky horse-drawn route.
After that, the development of the monorail stalled for half a century, mainly due to the impossibility of modernizing the technology. The fact is that the only potentially suitable tractor for trolleys could only be a steam engine, but at that time it was still too heavy. The situation changed only when an electric drive appeared, and the bridge structures became metal.
Henry Palmer's patent for his monorail.
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At the end of the 19th century, several monorail transport projects were simultaneously developed in different countries - the USA, Germany, Russia. The main domestic development of this type was the so-called Gatchina road. The presentation of this project took place in St. Petersburg in 1897 by its author, engineer Ippolit Romanov.
His model was a carriage that moved along an overpass 200 meters long at a speed of 15 km / h. In 1900, the magazine "Zheleznodorozhnoe Delo" published an article about the Gatchina road, where it was recognized as its superiority over its foreign counterparts. However, despite the promise and successful test results, the Romanov project was never developed.
The Gatchina Monorail could have become the beginning of a large project, but it did not happen.
But the ideas of the German engineer Karl Eugen Langen, albeit after his death, were implemented so successfully, are still working. The Eugen Lagen monorail suspension system was built in the German town of Wuppertal and commissioned on March 1, 1901. Its length is 13.3 km, and it runs both over the city streets and over the bed of the Wupper River at an altitude of about twelve meters. Today, the Wuppertal Railway has the proud title of the oldest monorail suspended transport in the world.
Eugen's Wuppertal monorail - more than a hundred years of successful work.
World wars and the transport revolution in the form of the emergence of aviation somewhat suspended the development of monorails, although no one finally forgot about them, continuing to develop all new projects. But in the domestic open spaces for a long time, ideas of this type were not ousted from the periphery of history.
The situation could radically change and become a new round in the history of monorail development under Khrushchev. The secretary general, seeing the French experience in the construction and operation of this type of transport, rightly decided that the suspended carriageway could be a solution to the problem of congestion of the land road. They took up Nikita Sergeevich's proposal with due enthusiasm.
Monorail on the cover of the Youth Technique magazine.
In record time, Soviet specialists developed several projects at once, as well as technical requirements for monorails. According to the government's plans, the suspension road was to appear in most of the major cities of the USSR. However, after Khrushchev left his post and the winding down of a number of similar projects abroad, these ambitious plans remained on paper.
And yet they managed to build something according to these ideas. We are talking about the Kiev elevated road. Only this monorail overpass was created not by specialists from Moscow, but by enthusiasts of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute (A. Shapovalenko, K. Bykov, A. Vishnikin and S. Rebrov), with the support of the director of the plant named after Dzerzhinsky G. Izheli and financial assistance from the government of Ukraine. Alas, it did not become a fully realized project, but it was closest to being realized.
The Kiev monorail had every chance of being realized.
It cannot be said that with the onset of the new century, everyone abruptly forgot about the single-rail track. After all, such roads are periodically built, the same applies to the Moscow monorail, opened in 2004. There are also foreign projects of this kind. However, it did not become the "transport panacea" that this transport was seen a hundred years ago. We can only hope that the monorail projects will one day become relevant again.
Moscow monorail.