The Lartigue Monorail of Listowel

A small heritage market town called Listowel in County Kerry, Ireland, is home to one of the strangest monorail system ever built. Instead of lying flat on the ground, the single rail sits above the ground on a trestle held by supports on either side, each making an “A” shape. Specially-built carriages would sit astride the trestles like panniers on a camel’s back. Indeed, it was camels that inspired French engineer Charles Lartigue to come up with this system. While in Algeria, Lartigue had seen camels carrying heavy loads balanced in panniers high on their backs and this inspired him to design a new type of railway. In Lartigue’s system, the single rail was raised to about waist-height by triangular supports whose base was about four feet wide. A pair of additional rails on either side of the main rail were provided for guidewheels of the locomotives and rolling stock to help stabilize the train while in motion. A replica of the Lartigue Monorail that ran between Ballybunion and Listowel for 36 years. Photo: Steve Edge/Flickr The biggest advantage of the Lartigue Monorail, especially on the sandy deserts of Alegria where he built a 90 km track, was that it kept the sands away. The monorail he built in the Sahara used mules instead of locomotives to pull the wagons and was used to transport esparto grass across the desert. Back in London, Lartigue presented his invention in an exhibition, and it attracted the interest of several European railway companies. But only two Lartigues were ever built—one in France, but it was never used, and the other linked the two rural towns of Listowel and Ballybunion, in County Kerry in the South West of Ireland. When it opened on February 29th, 1888, it was the world's first passenger-carrying monorail. The Lartigue Monorail was cheap to construct but extremely tricky to operate. For one, everything had to be balanced.