“But for the very generous contributions from The American Ireland Fund, the committee would not be able to bring the project to its present stage. Future financial assistance will be vital to complete phase II of the project.”

Jimmy Deenihan, Chairman

lartigue monorail restoration project
An effort to restore an original section of this unique monorail. Funding helps cover the cost of a locomotive engine.

The Monorail Society is a voluntary organization founded to promote awareness and use of the monorail system in Ireland. Named after French engineer Charles Lartique, only two examples of the monorail were built in the world, in Ireland and the other in France. Linking Listowel and Ballybunion in County Kerry it ran from1888 for 36 years after which it fell into disrepair.

The Lartigue Monorail aims to restore and reintroduce the monorail system to Ireland. The Lartigue Monorail aims to restore and reintroduce the monorail system to Ireland. Citing Ireland’s recent problems with traffic congestion and environmental hazards, the promotion of the monorail in Ireland is seen as a viable new answer to Ireland’s transportation problems.

Senator Maurice Hayes (2006) shares thoughts on The Lartigue Railway
The railway was built in 1888 and ran until 1924. It was erected under a special Act of Parliament at a time when there was something of a boom in building light railways in Ireland to link remoter areas with the spreading main line systems. The economic purpose was to transport sand from the sandhills of Ballybunion, the nine miles to the railhead at Listowel for use as a fertiliser by the farmers of North Kerry and West Limerick. So there you had it, a group of developers looking for a train and an inventor looking for a chance to build a prototype. The basis of the design was a single rail mounted on trestles about a metre high, with the carriages dangling from a single wheel mounted on a central axle.

Lartigue had developed the system to cope with conditions in Algeria where he was a mining engineer and needed to move ore from the inland mines to the ports. Ordinary rails tended to be blocked continuously by drifting sand. One day he saw a camel-train silhouetted against the evening sky and he had his answer. The camels’ legs represented the trestles, the body the motive power, and balance was achieved by distributing the load in panniers hanging on either side of the camel’s hump.
And so was born the Lartigue Monorail system, the ultimate ancestor of all subsequent monorail and overhead railways.
The reconstructed stretch of line with carriages rescued from duty as henhouses or garden sheds for the best part of a century, was opened by the President of Ireland, Mrs. Mary MacAleese on a beautiful day on October 14 2005, eighty-one years to the day since the last train pulled into the station.

The occasion had a particular resonance for me since my grandfather, Maurice Nugent, had been employed as a carpenter on the construction of the railway and stayed on the staff until it closed in 1924. It was a moving experience to sit in a carriage which he had built nearly 120 years earlier, to note the strong dovetails, the still sliding windows and the screwed and planked seats. My mother had been born and spent her childhood in a little cottage on the edge of what might laughingly be called the marshalling yard of the Lartigue, and our childhood in a fishing village in County Down was illuminated by her memories of the train which had dominated her Kerry infancy – the great monster belching smoke from two nostrils, with a single blazing eye thundering out of the night; the fun of having to trim the load, to balance a fat man on one side with two thin ladies on the other, the passengers who had to get out and push to get the train up a hill.
The train ran for 36 years, most of the time at a loss, and was finally finished off by damage inflicted during the Civil War.

It has now been partially restored to contribute to the local economy as a tourist attraction, and the Committee have plans to restore the old engine shed as a museum and interpretive centre. Lartigue rides again. It is sobering to reflect that if the original objective of transporting sand from Ballybunion had been realised, the region’s greatest tourist asset, the world famous Ballybunion golf links might well have been obliterated. God moves in mysterious ways.