Railways

3923

Railways

to 6ist Street with stations between. Other
lines soon followed not only in New York
but in Brooklyn, Jersey City, Chicago, Bos-
ton, and Philadelphia in the United States,
and in Berlin and Liverpool.

The first underground railway was opened
in London in 1853. In 1886 a tunnel 3^
m. long was bored for the City and South
London Railway, and in 1893 an under-
ground railway was built in Budapest. In
the United States the first underground
railway or subway was opened in Boston
in 1897, the first New York subway was
opened in 1904, and the combined elevated
and underground system of Philadelphia in
1905. Both underground and elevated rail-
roads may be divided into three classes: Those

pended below it, and thus preserve their bal-
ance entirely by gravity; (2) those in which
the vehicles are arranged pannierwise strad-
dling the monorail, and the center of gravity
more nearly approaches the top of the run-
ning rail; (3) those in which the center of
gravity is entirely above the running rail;
(4) those in which the center of gravity is
above the rail and the balance is obtained by
a gyroscope or a rapidly spinning flywheel
on board the car.

Of the first system, the best known ex-
ample is that of the suspended railway along
the valley of the Wupper ui Rhenish Prus-
sia, from Elberfeld to Barmen. The line is
SJ4 miles long and proceeds partly through
the main streets of the towns it traverses and

The German Mono-Railway Car.

for trains forming ? system entirely inde-
pendent of the means of conveyance on the
surface of the street, as most of the New
York lines; Ihosc for surface cars, in order
to relieve congestion on crowded or narrow
thoroughfares, as some of the Boston sub-
ways; and those for the purpose of crossing
obstacles to continuous transit, as the tun-
nel? under the East River in New York. (See
SUBWAYS; TUNNELS).

Monorailways differ from the usual type
of. railway in that a single rail is used to sup-
port the weight of the car, although there
may be additional guide rails. They have
proved successful in mines and quarries, for
handling material in factories, and, to a lim-
ited extent, for regular passenger traffic.

Monorailways may be roughly divided
into four classes: (i) Those in which the
center of gravity is entirely below the sup-
porting rail, so that the vehicles hang sus-

partly suspended over the course of the river
Wupper. In the second class of monorailways
the vehicles are arranged in duplicate, one on
each side of the support rail, on which the
wheels run (tandemwise). The first railway of
this type appears to have been laid in 1825
at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire, England, for
the conveyance of bricks. A monorail system
of this type was installed in 1910 on a short
branch line of the New Haven Railroad run-
ning through Pelham Bay Park to City
Island, in the Borough of the Bronx, New
York City. The line was abandoned, how-
ever, after a limited period of use. Mono-
rails of the third type are used extensively
in sugar and coffee plantations, and form a
very cheap and effective means of haulage
of a temporary nature.

The fourth or gyroscopic class of mono-
railway depends on the tendency of a rapidly
spinning heavy wheel to maintain the plane