Listowel and Ballybunion Railway
The Listowel and Ballybunion Railway was the world's first commercially used monorail . It linked the places Listowel and Ballybunion in County Kerry , Ireland . The railway was used for both passenger and freight traffic .
history
After Charles Lartigue had gained experience with the monorail system he had developed in Algeria and on an exhibition track in London, he endeavored to use it to build a public railway line on the British Isles, which should ideally serve as a model for further projects. Since at the same time there was an application from the population in the Irish county of Kerry for the construction of a railway line between Listowel and Ballybunion, the decision to build the railway according to Lartigue's idea should have resulted from this. Its construction cost 30,000 pounds sterling , which was financed without state subsidies. The railway was opened on February 29, 1888. Lartigue's expectation that the railway would attract licensees for his patents was not fulfilled, which on the one hand was due to its location in a secluded corner of Ireland, but on the other hand was even more due to the numerous complications associated with the technology would have.
The trains often carried cattle and sand from the beach in freight transport. The people of Kerry and Limerick took it to the beach and golf courses of Ballybunion and the school children of Ballybunion to Listowel Secondary School. Despite its unusual system and all the disadvantages associated with it, the Listowel and Ballybunion Railway was operated for 36 years without ever having made any significant profit. The railway was damaged in the Irish Civil War and then shut down for economic reasons in 1924.
technology
The technology in which the railway was built was also called the Lartigue system after its builder, and the railway was also called the Lartigue monorail .
Track
The Listowel and Ballybunion Railway was 14.4 kilometers (9 miles ) long. The trains ran on an elevated track . The switches were similar to a turntable , realized as rotatable segments of the elevated roadway.
Road junctions were a problem with the Lartigue technique. The track had to be crossed with a drawbridge so that road traffic could pass , a time-consuming process that required staff to operate the system at every intersection with a street. Where agricultural paths crossed, the authorized farmers had a key that enabled them to fold away the track. These points were signal-secured, which meant that agricultural traffic had priority over rail traffic.
vehicles
The railway was operated with three steam locomotives with the " wheel arrangement " 0-3-0 (ie three driven individual wheels). There were also guide wheels on which no weight was placed. The locomotives were built in 1888 by the Hunslet Engine Company , Leeds . The maximum permissible speed was 29 km / h (18 mph), but the locomotives were able to drive 48 km / h (30 mph) safely. During the construction of the railway there should have been a smaller locomotive. To balance the weight, the locomotives had two boilers , one on each side of the rail in the middle . The cars also had a car body on each side of the track, with no passage between these two parts. The passengers sat on longitudinal benches that were arranged towards the center of the vehicle. Passenger trains carried a staircase, a kind of "pedestrian overpass", with which the platform and the train could be crossed in order to get to the other side during a stop.
The balancing of the vehicles was one of the biggest problems of the company: Passenger cars had to be manned for a journey so that the weight of the passengers was approximately the same on each side of the car. If a single cow was to be brought to market, two calves had to be carried on the other side of the freight wagon to compensate for the weight, and they then had to be driven back again - each on one side of the wagon. A freight wagon could load twelve cows.
Museum train
In 2003, the Lartigue Monorailway Restoration Committee , a voluntary association, put a one-kilometer-long replica of the historic railway into operation on the original route in Listowel. She uses a diesel locomotive that is externally modeled on the earlier steam locomotives. The replica locomotive and wagons were made by Alan Keef (Lea, near Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire ).
photos
Freight train on the open route
Passenger train in Ballybunion station
Transition from one side of a car to the other
Train at the crossing point
Replica on the turntable (2006)
swell
literature
- Richard Deiss: Vane Cathedral and Sugar Beet Station. A short story about 200 European train stations . Bonn 2010, p. 75
- Michael Guerin: The Lartigue: Listowel and Ballybunion Railway . Lartigue Centenary Committee. Listowel 1988. ISBN 0-9513549-0-6
- AT Newham: The Listowel and Ballybunion Railway . Oakwood Press 1998. ISBN 0-85361-093-2
- Patrick Whitehouse, John Snell: Narrow Gauge Railways of the British Isles . 2nd edition. David & Charles, Newton Abbot 1994, ISBN 0-7153-0196-9 .
Movies
- The Listowel and Ballybunion Railway. Great Britain 1920. 16mm silent film . Length: 3 minutes. Available at: British Film Institute .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Narrow Gauge Railways of the British Isles, p. 108
- ↑ Guerin, Michael (1988). The Lartigue: Listowel and Ballybunion Railway. Listowel: Lartigue Centenary Committee. ISBN 0-9513549-0-6 .
- ^ AT Newham, Michael Foster [1967]: The Listowel & Ballybunion Railway (= Locomotion Papers). Oakwood Press, Headington 1989, ISBN 0-85361-376-1 , pp. 46, 65, LP33.
- ↑ George Augustus Nokes. In: The Railway Magazine, November 1924. London.
- ↑ You can find an illustration of this on the museum railway website here .
- ^ John Huntley: Railways in the Cinema . London 1969, pp. 101, 135.