THE PATIALA STATE
MONORAIL TRAMWAY
Possibly the world's most obscure railway...

The engine and coach, saved by British Rail Historian Mike Satow, operating at the Delhi Railway Museum .

Notice the single steel rail centered under the train and the balance wheel running on a concrete strip which simulates the highway it ran on in regular service. The rail carried aproximately 95% of the weight and the road or balance wheel only 5%.

The Weather at the National Railway Museum

Introduction Of all the applications of steel wheels on steel rails, Monorails have perhaps drawn the least interest. Whatever their form, there always seem to be aspects of impracticality. The Wuppertaler Schwebebahn succeeded by virtue of straddling a creek and using its route as a right of way, a situation not easy to duplicate. The Seattle-Disney-Tokyo monorails require elevated structures of immense cost and have a huge footprint on the ground. Their mechanical requirements for switching cars are exceeded in complexity only by those for cog railroads. The Listowel and Ballybunion in Ireland, built to the Lartigue system, was in effect a fence across the landscape with every road crossing requiring a drawbridge over it. One of the very few which carried freight, it gave new meaning to the idea of a balanced freight traffic. It too required a goodly amount of machinery to switch from one track to another.

The PSMT
The subject of this net page is the Patiala State Monorail Tramway as built at Patiala in the Punjab area of northwest India.

Into Obscurity Whether it was the time or the place I do not know, but perhaps the two together conspired to bury this unique little line in the dust of time. I have found little more than brief published mentions of it and some of those were obviously mistaken conjecture. It was so different from other railways and indeed from other monorails that it was probably easier to dismiss it than to understand it. And yet, from what I can learn of it, it was effective, efficient, and exactly what the situation called for.

The PSMT was begun in 1907. Within a few years the advent of cars and trucks had the same effect on this line as it did on so many others. In 1927 the line was closed and here again it became unique. While most abandoned rail equipment is soon fed to the scrappers torch and furnace, the PSMT's equipment was simply walked away from. For 35 years it rested where it was left. If it were not for a Mr. Mike Satow, a historian of things railroady in India, who discoverd the remains in 1962, it would have disappeared from memory by now and so this page is dedicated to him. Largely due to him, one engine was restored to full working order by the Northern Railway Workshops at Amritsar. They also reconstructed the Chief Engineer's private inspection car on an old underframe and the two were placed as an operating display at the National Railway Museum of India.

For pictures and on-site reports of the National Railway Museum operation

The National Railway Museum also has an internet site. At one time they had a Quicktime clip of the monorail operating at the museum. This seems to have been removed. In the section on outdoor exhibits there is a brief description of the PSMT and a picture.

To view the NRMI site

Your Back button will return you to this site whenever you wish.

The Ewing System Monorails have to balance, right? I mean, that's the point to the whole thing isn't it? One rail and the train balances on top of it. Sure, you have to cheat a bit and have guide rails or wrap the equipment around the rail like a rider on a horse or stick a big gyroscope in somewhere but it balances, that's a monorail. The idea of an unbalanced monorail seems to go against all the ideals of "the way it's supposed to be" but unbalanced it was and run it did and for a good long time. The system or concept was called the Ewing System. and I once saw a line in a book saying that it was originally concieved with construction site railways in mind. There were patents applied for by a British inventor W. J. Ewing in the last part of the 19th century cocnerning a monorail tramway but the UK patent office reports that these documents have been "abandoned". The Machester Public Library of Manchester. England helped me to understand that Mr Ewing seems to have abandoned his efforts to obtain a patent. The Ewing System, wherever it came from, "got out of the box". It deliberately didn't balance. We all know (well if you're reading anything this obscure, you probably do) that a steel rail can carry more load with less rolling friction than any highway surface ever invented. And if you've ever tried to lay track or maintain track, no matter what the gauge, you also know that the relationship of each rail to the other must be very exact or you end up spending more time putting things back on the track than you do running and riding. It isn't just distance between rails (gauge) either. Both rails have to rise and fall and bank together or it is quickly "on the ground" time.

With only one rail and double flanged rail wheels, the Ewing System avoided all those problems. Laid out along the side of a road, it took up very little land. Since the road or balance wheel carried only 4% or 5% of the load, it did not subtract much from the steel wheel-steel rail efficiency. The track was no obstacle to vehicles crossing it. The downside was that the road wheel always ran in exactly the same path and on the softer surfaced roads of that day this sometimes tended to create a rut. This was evidently a problem of some magnitude for the PSMT. A double flanged wheel on one side and an unflanged wheel on the other side was also used by the Funnicular Railways although in that application, the unflanged wheel rolled upon another rail. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the Ewing system

A further advantage was the ability to use rather sharp radius curves. On a conventional railway, the difference in length or distance traveled between the inside and outside rails is a factor in Curve Resistance. In other words, the wheels on the inside rail travel a shorter distance than the wheels on the outside rail to get the vehicle around a curve and this has to be equalized by some means. On the Ewing System this was not a factor of any signifigance.

Think of it this way: A three legged stool always sits firmly, no matter where it's put down. A four legged piece of furniture needs an absolutely level floor and four exactly equal legs or it teeters. On a railway, the teetering lifts one flange high enought to cross over the rail head and off you go

It really did have a lot going for it...

Construction Some time in the late 1800's or early 1900's a British engineer while out for a Sunday's walk wandered across the border into the state of Patiala in India. He was come upon by soldiers of that state and from that chance beginning Col. Bowles became the civil engineer of many projects carried out by the Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh. Where Col. Bowles heard about the Ewing Monorail system has not yet been discovered. At that time he was engineer in charge of the construction of the Kharagpur Workshops of the Bengal - Nagpur Railway and was using the Ewing monorail system for handling materials on the building site. The actual construction of the PSMT was carried out under contract by Ms. Marshland Price & Co. The final outcome was a railway of over 50 miles of track.

The Route Actually the PSMT consisted of two unconnected lines. One ran 15 miles from Sirhind on the Northwestern Railway to Morinda. The other ran from Patiala towards Sunam some thirty miles west and may possibly have never reached its projected terminus.

From searching the internet it has been established that the area through which the line ran is basically flat or slightly rolling country. Thus it seems that there would not have been any great engineering works. There may have been some irrigation canal bridges but that is pure guessing

Freight and Passengers?
Three wheeled (two double flanged and one road wheel) open freight cars pulled by teams of bullocks. This shows how the track ran by the side of the road..

The area was and is a grain producing area (sometimes called the wheat bowl) and the best guess is that crops were the primary freight. These old pictures show small cars loaded with sacks. This could be a scene on the Sirhind - Morinda line or the Patiala - Sunam line as animal power was used on both.

Was this the Railway's Yards?

What passenger traffic it had is unknown other than what is stated in the article by H.R. Ambler. The picture above from an old book seems to show at least two small passenger cars but the location remains a mystery. The passenger car on display at the National Railway Museum is actually a reconstruction (on a recovered actual running gear) of the private inspection car of the line's chief engineer, Col. Bowles.

The Locomotives The total roster of steam locomotives consisted of 4 (four) 0-3-0's built by Orenstein & Koppel of Berlin in 1909. These were an adaptation of the normal O&K 0-6-0's but had a double flanged driver in the center of each axle rather than drivers at each end. The right-hand water tank was larger so that some of the weight shifted onto the 39 inch diameter balance wheel which was attached beyond the enlarged water tank. The outside cylinders were 5 1/2" X 14".The designer at O&K took advantage of the extra cab space behind the enlarged right-hand water tank and put the fire door on the right side of the fire box rather than at the back as is usually done. These locos were confined to the Patiala - Sunam line.

Other Power The one picture above from a 1920's book shows individual cars being pulled by teams of bullocks.There are also published references to mules being used. The Sirhind - Morinda line with one exception was entirely animal powered.

New Technology?

The above picture shows a three or more car train pulled by an obviously home built gas powered loco. The caption for the photo says that the engine was taken from "an ordinary motorcar". This experiment by Col. Bowles was the exception to animal power on the Sirhind - Morinda line. This 1920's venture was quite possibly the first locally built, internal combustion locomotive on the Indian sub-continent.

Addendum

As this writer worked at pulling together what was known of the PSMT, it became more and more obvious that there were one or more documents out there somewhere that others had access to. Finally a copy of that document was sent me. Railway Magazine carried in 1969 an article by H. R. Ambler about this obscure monorail. Railway Magazine has extended permission to have the article scanned and included here for which many thanks are given. If you read it carefully you will see the two mischances that erased much of the history of this line. Mr. Ambler mentions accessing archives at Patiala. Let us hope that he obtained all that was available there since this writer has never found any person or organization able and willing to help with contacting those archives

The quality of these scans is less than best. I had to start with a copy mauled by the post office, made from an old magazine, on a rather indifferent copy machine. They have been extensively manipulated in a graphics program. Using a higher resolution scan would have made them clearer but took too much bandwidth. I think you will still enjoy reading H. R. Ambler's words.

To read the article (be patient while it loads)


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The National Railway Museum guide book says that mules were used at one time. BBC (British Broadcasting) did a video of Indian Railways and showed Mike Satow visiting the rusted remains he found in Patiala. In a brief glimpse of a car underframe, there appears to be an electric motor driving one or more wheels.

ONE OTHER LINE In the "High Ranges" in southern India an Ewing System line was built in 1902 to handle the Tea harvest as well as other freight and passengers. It ran out to a Top Station from where the freight was transferred to an Aerial Ropeway which dropped 6,400 feet to Keranganie on the plain below. Motive power was provided by teams of small ponies. A picture (too poor to reproduce) shows a three bench covered open car with side curtains. It is captioned as the lines "First Class Accommodation". The line was replaced in 1908 with a conventional light railway.

THE COUNT GOES ON As of April, 2001 interest in these pages is running at more than 350 viewers per month.

Thanks Due This bit of history is begining to be the work of many people. Any time a writer atempts to give credit, they run a risk of forgetting someone and thus offending them. So first of all, Thank You to all those who have given suggestions and don't find your name listed here

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Special Thanks to:

Ruediger Fach of the Frankfurt Feldbahn Museum for two pictures showing the preserved locomotive and reproduced car in action at the museum in New Delhi.

Keith Manison of Kingston, Jamaica for copies from a 60+years old book.

Anne Ogborn of New Delhi and Oakland, CA USA for on-site observations and much help in obtaining further information. Anne suggested we from a PSMT fan club. I said that we had and that we were the only two members...

Kelvin Parkes of Bad Vilbel, Germany for copies from an old engineering encyclopedia.

Ralf Schriener of Wurms,Germany for a picture and for listing the PSMT in the research column of his site. His Light Railway site covers other railways used in similar situations and is well worth a visit. http://www.feldbahn.de

S. Shankar of Poona, India who found information for me in the guide book of the National Railway Museum of India

Prakash Tedulkar of Los Angeles, USA for permission to link to his pictures of the PSMT. A very nice set of pictures

If you have any information , photos, or drawings regarding this line, its equipment, route, engineering works, operations or of the area it ran through, please contribute to its history. ---If you have any Railroad Encyclopedias of the 1900 to 1920 era, please check them to see if they have any information about this railway and if they do please contact me---. Email information or comments to webmaster@irfca.org.

© Donald W. Dickens, 1998

Last updated December 12, 2003 by Tjalling Ament

Would you believe, these pages have been paid the compliment of being copied in part by a site concerning Patiala. They even had the gall to claim my text under their copyright notice.

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