t this could be used to reduce the cost of the building railways as major work wouldn’t be needed to build gentler curves. Despite its early success at doing this the system failed partly due to its unique gauge, 5ft 8 ¾ was needed to allow space for the guide wheels and the invention of the bogie in the 1850s allowed conventional trains to negotiate similarly tight curves. Although the Arnoux system continued to be used for a short time it was abandoned in the late 1860s when the company was taken over by the Paris-Orleans Railway and the track converted to standard gauge. Much of the route is now part of the Paris suburban railway, the RER.
Whilst most railways were designed with the train’s wheels firmly on the ground, a Scottish inventor, George Bennie came up with the idea for railway in the sky in the 1920s. Bennie’s Railplane was a suspended railway that was driven by propellers. It was conceived as a low-cost means of separating slow-moving freight and passenger rail traffic as Bennie saw congestion as a threat to the future viability of the railways. The Railplane gantry was to be erected above a conventional rail line or road and would allow passengers to travel safely, swiftly and commodiously. This meant the conventional railways could operate a greater volume of freight traffic which was an area of their business that they were losing to road haulage firms.
A test track was constructed over the LNER line in Milngavie and it opened to much fanfare in 1929, even hosting a delegation of LNER officials. However Bennie’s funding soon ran out as orders did not materialise. Several outlandish schemes were proposed, including a Railplane link between London and Paris (the Channel crossing was to be made by seaplane) and even a Railplane connection between Baghdad and Damascus. Bennie’s concept didn’t take off as its novelty and impracticality prevented its wider adoption. However another suspended railway, the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn in Germany, has proved more successful and is still in use today.
Whilst all these designs may seem rather eccentric to twentieth-first century eyes, they were all serious attempts to improve on contemporary technology and tackle the many technological challenges that the railways faced. They show that for every successful idea that is used on the railways today, many more ideas were discarded and left by the wayside.
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