A monorail is just like any railway – except for that it uses just one rail instead of a pair of rails. Monorail trains started production at the beginning of the 20th century. The earliest monorail trains were stabilized by a gyroscope. With this new innovation, the inventor wanted to establish a high speed rail system across all of Europe.
Currently, Asia has the most monorail system are in operation. Beginning in the 1980’s, monorail systems for mass transit became more and more popular in Japan. Today, the monorail running in Tokio is one of the busiest in the world. It averages with 130,000 passengers per day. Since it began its operation in 1964, it is estimated to have transported over 1.5 billion passengers. In other parts of the world, one can encounter monorails mostly in private entertainment parks or at airports.
One of the major drawbacks of monorail systems used to be especially in their early days the inability to switch rails. Some of the early monorails like the suspended monorail of Wuppertal in Germany, have a design that makes it almost impossible to switch from one rail to another. The Wuppertal monorail dates back to the year 1901 and is still in operation.
Many monorails tried to avoid this problem by using circular tracks that form a continuous loop.
Modern monorails in Japan can switch tracks quite efficiently meanwhile. Thus, monorails in Japan can operate with a usual layout of the tracks without any special concern for avoiding the switching from one rail to another.
Enjoy this video that is introducing the amazing monorail system in Osaka, Japan and how it can switch rails: