Reviving rural railways with Monocab

Britain’s railway network is a fraction of what it was a century ago. With the rise of private motoring and the building of the road network, railways were less important – and less glamorous too in the new age of the motorcar. The network was trimmed and consolidated.

Most notorious was the programme of cuts known as the ‘Beeching Axe’, which cut back services on branch lines. Between the mid-60s and the mid-80s, the country lost a quarter of its rail network and half its stations. The slimmed down network was more economical, but many people lost their public transport connection, especially in rural areas. It tied rural communities to their cars instead.

Start talking about car culture today and reducing car dependency, and the needs of those in the countryside will always come up as an objection. All very well for the metropolitans to talk about electric buses, trams or micro-cars, but it won’t work out here. We need our cars.

Over the years, some of the Beeching cuts have been reversed and more are on their way. But there’s no escaping the fact that trains are expensive to run, and it just isn’t practical to run services to remote areas where not enough people will use them. To keep a marginal rural line open, or revive one that has been lost, you’d need a very different model to the timetabled trains we’re used to. Something lighter, more flexible, and more affordable.

Perhaps something like the Monocab Owl, an ingenious rural rail project being developed in Germany. Rather than run full size trains, they are creating small cabs that can carry a few people at a time. They’re self-driving, so they can run on-demand. If you need a ride into town, you could order one in the same way that you’d call a cab. Like a rail taxi.

If you think about the practicalities of this, there is an immediate problem to overcome. Most rural branch lines have just one set of tracks. Trains can’t overtake each other, and you can’t run two trains in opposite directions on a single track. This is an age-old complication with the railways, orginally solved with the use of a token system. That avoids trains meeting each other head on, but it doesn’t get you round the fundamental limits of a single track.

That’s where Monocab have done something rather brilliant: their cabs run on a single rail, and are narrow enough to pass another one running on the opposite side. With this system, you can have cabs zipping back and forth as needed. All you need is a vehicle that can balance on two wheels without falling over.

Luckily the technology to do that has been around for a while, though it still looks absurd when you see it. The Brennan Monorail was invented in 1910, designed to save money by creating railways that only needed a single rail. It balances using gyroscopes, and that is explained in this video if you are… ahem… inclined to know more.

Monocab have revived that idea, combining it with modern self-driving capabilities and the convenience of an on-demand transport app. They have tested prototype vehicles, demonstrated their viability, and are currently investigating the possibilities of introducing the service on rural lines in Germany. It’s early days, and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

The technology is impressive, but there are two other really important aspects to Monocab to point out. One is that it preserves and extends the usefulness of existing infrastructure. That keeps costs down, and avoids disruption and environmental damage. It reinvents what we already have and brings it into the 21st century, rather than requiring extensive new construction – like the Hyperloop for example.

Secondly, it’s an important social technology. It serves the countryside, communities that are often marginalised and left behind. Services often reach the countryside last, like high-speed broadband, or never at all – good luck getting an Uber out here. So it’s great to see a sustainable transit idea specifically aimed at the countryside, that would help to reduce transport inequalities between rural and urban.