Mono rail

[92912]

Absolute narrow gauge at the Tanat Valley Railway in 2019. A couple of the power units had been converted to carry passengers

[009 micro modeller]

Ah yes, the Road Machines monorail, I think originally developed for use on building sites. They have a demonstration line at Amberley as well now I think. This is the Rich Morris monorail collection isn’t it?

[92912]

31 minutes ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Ah yes, the Road Machines monorail, I think originally developed for use on building sites. They have a demonstration line at Amberley as well now I think. This is the Rich Morris monorail collection isn’t it?

Yes it is the Rich Morris collection and yes Amberley have a demo line but no sign of any activity when I was there recently

[decauville1126]

3 minutes ago, 92912 said:

Amberley have a demo line but no sign of any activity when I was there recently

 

 

Tends to be demonstrated at the two Industrial Trains Days (Spring and Autumn) and the 2-day Summer Gala in July.

[Johann Marsbar]

We've got one of those monorail units (fitted with a tipper) in a rather poor condition available for free if anyone wants to preserve one. It was offered to a couple of groups but nobody seems interested .......

We used to have a load of track as well, but that rusted away over the years .

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, Johann Marsbar said:

We've got one of those monorail units (fitted with a tipper) in a rather poor condition available for free if anyone wants to preserve one. It was offered to a couple of groups but nobody seems interested .......

We used to have a load of track as well, but that rusted away over the years .

Sadly I doubt that I would have the skills to restore or anywhere to put it, but I’d love to see any photos if you have them. Would it fit in at somewhere like Leighton Buzzard (as part of the displays at Stonehenge Works, for instance)?

[Johann Marsbar]

47 minutes ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Sadly I doubt that I would have the skills to restore or anywhere to put it, but I’d love to see any photos if you have them. Would it fit in at somewhere like Leighton Buzzard (as part of the displays at Stonehenge Works, for instance)?

 

Unfortunately it's one of those things I've never taken a photo of, despite us having it for the past 43 years!

It arrived in 1980 along with an ex RAF Barford & Perkins runway roller (1924) , the latter item being restored in the early 1980's but the monorail was never touched. Both have a fairly tenuous connection to the area, so they are both available for disposal as part of a review of our Museum collection and are being advertised as such.

The Monorail has mainly been in outside storage for all those years, hence its poor condition.

[Michael Hodgson]

4 hours ago, Johann Marsbar said:

 

We used to have a load of track as well, but that rusted away over the years .

That style of track does rather look as though it would fall apart fairly quickly

[009 micro modeller]

4 hours ago, Johann Marsbar said:

Both have a fairly tenuous connection to the area, so they are both available for disposal as part of a review of our Museum collection and are being advertised as such.

Have you publicised it via the Museums Association or similar as well?

 

I’d be interested to know what they were used for. The motorised skip wagon/tipper ones (as also seen at Amberley) I think were driverless and used on temporary lines on building sites, but a lot of the vehicles in the Morris collection at Tanat Valley look more like proper locomotives with wagons, and I’d be interested to know if they were used on some more complicated system.

Edited August 27, 2023 by 009 micro modeller

[Johann Marsbar]

33 minutes ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Have you publicised it via the Museums Association or similar as well?

 

I’d be interested to know what they were used for. The motorised skip wagon/tipper ones (as also seen at Amberley) I think were driverless and used on temporary lines on building sites, but a lot of the vehicles in the Morris collection at Tanat Valley look more like proper locomotives with wagons, and I’d be interested to know if they were used on some more complicated system.

 

I'm not involved in the direct disposal process for the three vehicles currently available but am dealing with disposal of some other items which is being done directly with Museums that would either make use of the equipment or they are things that complement their respective collecting policies.

 

The monorail we have came from a firm of builders in Suffolk and was presumably used on a construction site as a temporary feature.

[Nearholmer]

The two big uses of these monorails were in construction and in sewage works.

 

The latter used them widely when cleaning-out filter beds and settling ponds. I’m not certain, but I think many of those in the RM collection came from sewage works, and I think that despite some controversy about the gauge criteria the collection might be listed in recent IRS ‘EL’ handbooks; if so, that will tell you exactly which places they came from.

 

in both main uses, the USP was the same: easy and quick set-up, and the ability to get into very narrow spaces. 2ft gauge jubilee track requires a wider, better formation than these things, especially because they will “contour run” by using different length legs on either side, which is good for things like railway site work, because they can be set-up along an embankment or cutting slope and be used while the line is open, while jubilee track often had to go in the cess or the four-foot.

 

PS: I think RM’s locos have ‘nameplates’ which denote which sewage works they came from, don’t they?

 

PPS: there’s a good video on YouTube of a set-up running at Amberley, showing quite nicely how little footprint it needs.

 

 

Edited August 27, 2023 by Nearholmer

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

The two big uses of these monorails were in construction and in sewage works.

 

The latter used them widely when cleaning-out filter beds and settling ponds. I’m not certain, but I think many of those in the RM collection came from sewage works, and I think that despite some controversy about the gauge criteria the collection might be listed in recent IRS ‘EL’ handbooks; if so, that will tell you exactly which places they came from.

 

in both main uses, the USP was the same: easy and quick set-up, and the ability to get into very narrow spaces. 2ft gauge jubilee track requires a wider, better formation than these things, especially because they will “contour run” by using different length legs on either side, which is good for things like railway site work, because they can be set-up along an embankment or cutting slope and be used while the line is open, while jubilee track often had to go in the cess or the four-foot.

 

PS: I think RM’s locos have ‘nameplates’ which denote which sewage works they came from, don’t they?

 

PPS: there’s a good video on YouTube of a set-up running at Amberley, showing quite nicely how little footprint it needs.

 

 

I remembered vaguely how it worked, and about the filter bed use, from reading this: https://www.irsociety.co.uk/Archives/16/Monorail.htm

 

It explains how the driverless powered skip wagons worked but doesn’t say as much about the locomotive units (with drivers) as in the Morris collection.

[Nearholmer]

The sludge settling ponds (were they called ‘weathering beds’?) were like big lagoons, shallow and wide, and once the ‘stuff’ had been in them for a few months there was a sort of soft soil, a bit like peat, left. Either a monorail track, or jubilee track was laid down into the stuff, and it was dug out and carried to a big tip (that might have been the weathering bed), where it spent a further few months and was then, I think, sold as fertiliser.

 

I only saw the monorails being used from a distance, but went to Minworth, just outside Birmingham, where they had an excellent 2ft gauge network, and saw that at close quarters. It was A Grand Day Out, and I remember one of the ‘runners’ (second man on a loco, doing the job that would be called ‘shunter’ on the main line), was wearing a huge sunflower pinned to his overalls to mark the event. There were sunflowers and tomatoes growing everywhere, because the seeds germinate best after ‘surviving the passage’.

 

 

Edited August 27, 2023 by Nearholmer

[009 micro modeller]

9 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The settling ponds (were they called ‘weathering beds’?) were like big lagoons, shallow and wide, and once the ‘stuff’ had been in them for a few months there was a sort of soft soil, a bit like peat, left. Either a monorail track, or jubilee track was laid down into the stuff, and it was dug out and carried to a big tip (that might have been the weathering bed), where it spent a further few months and was then, I think, sold as fertiliser.

Off topic but there’s some interesting 20” gauge equipment at Irchester Narrow Gauge Railway Museum, I think used for a similar purpose, which includes a mobile winch wagon to haul the skips up: https://ngon30.weebly.com/irchester.html

 

Were the monorails you saw powered driverless trollies like at Amberley or locos plus wagons, with drivers?

Edited August 27, 2023 by 009 micro modeller

[Nearholmer]

Yes, I’ve seen it, IIRC it came from one of the Northampton sewage works.

 

At most works, the sludge beds/ponds were about the size of a tennis court, maybe two, but at Minworth they were a lot bigger, maybe a large football pitch size. I guess Birmingham had a lot of throughput!

 

These days, I think it’s all done in enclosed tanks, and the methane given off by the bacteria that do all the work is trapped and used to fuel operations at the plants.