Monorail

A monorail is a railway in which the track consists of a single rail, typically elevated. The term is also used to describe the beam of the system, or the vehicles traveling on such a beam or track. The term originates from joining mono (one) and rail (rail), from as early as 1897, possibly from German engineer Eugen Langen, who called an elevated railway system with wagons suspended the Eugen Langen One-railed Suspension Tramway (Einschieniges Hängebahnsystem Eugen Langen).

Colloquially, the term "monorail" is often used to describe any form of elevated rail or people mover. More accurately, the term refers to the style of track, not its elevation, with 'Mono' being the Greek numeral prefix for one and 'Rail' meaning 'rail' structure utilized.

Differentiation from other transport systems

Monorails have found applications in airport transfer and medium capacity metros. To differentiate monorails from other transport modes, the Monorail Society says “Monorail n. 1. A single rail serving as a track for passenger or freight vehicles. In most cases rail is elevated, but monorails can also run at grade, below grade or in subway tunnels. Vehicles either are suspended from or straddle a narrow guide way. Monorail vehicles are wider than the guide way that supports them.”

Monorail (disambiguation)

Monorail and similar can mean:

See also

MonoRail (software)

MonoRail (formerly called Castle on Rails), a component of the Castle Project, is an open source web application framework built on top of the ASP.NET platform. Inspired by Ruby on Rails Action Pack, MonoRail differs from standard ASP.NET Web Forms development by enforcing separation of concerns using a model–view–controller (MVC) architecture. The framework is commonly used in conjunction with Castle ActiveRecord, an ORM layer built on NHibernate. In January 2010, version 2.0 of MonoRail was released, however, many projects use the trunk version of the source to take advantage of new features without waiting for official releases.

Although the project's name is MonoRail, it does not have any affiliation with the Mono project.

How it works

The framework maps web requests to an "action", which is a regular .NET method on the controller. The controller is responsible for invoking business services and controlling the application's flow. When it is time to send the web response to the client, the controller sets a view template to be rendered, putting data in a special dictionary object known as the "Property Bag", and delegates the template rendering to a view engine.