The Meigs Elevated Railway was an experimental but unsuccessful 19th-century elevated steam-powered urban rapid transit system, often described as a monorail but technically pre-electric third rail. It was invented in the United States by Josiah Vincent Meigs, of Lowell, Massachusetts, and was demonstrated from 1886 to 1894 in a suburb of Boston called East Cambridge. The basic premise for the design of the system was to make the street-level footprint of the line as narrow as possible, to ameliorate the problem of shadowing created by conventional urban elevated railroads.
source.image: Found And Explained
This entailed a single row of iron pillars of variable height, connected by single horizontal girders. On top of these girders was a pair of load-bearing rails, close together. In between the rails was a row of short posts, bearing a thick third rail. Each item of rolling stock (locomotive, tender or passenger car) had two trucks or bogies, each with four wheels. These wheels were angled inwards to sit on the load-bearing rails. In addition, each truck had a pair of horizontal spring-mounted gripper wheels which pinched the central upper rail.
Each item of rolling stock had two trucks or bogies, with four flanged load-bearing wheels each. The flanges of the gripper wheels were to hold the vehicle onto the track, so that it was unable to fall off. However, the truck frame was also provided with lugs in the event of wheel assembly breakage. The floor of the passenger car was a frame of C-channel beams of 5 inch (12.7 cm) gauge. It was 51.16 feet (15.6 metres) long, and 7.5 feet (2.3 metres) wide. The cylindrical car body was formed of hoops of light iron T-bars bent into a circle of diameter 10.7 feet (3.26 metres).
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The locomotive also was in the same cylindrical style, with a floor 8.9 by 2.3 metres and having similar fenestration, with seven windows in each lower row. The upper window rows, however, were interrupted by a glazed turret which was the engineer’s cab and so had five windows each. For the experimental train this cab only gave a view forwards and to the sides, but drawings of hypothetical trains in service show the cab to have a 360 degree view. Turning engines and marshalling trains to have the locomotive in front would have been very challenging to the system and running in reverse half the time would have been desirable…via/read more: wikipedia
