Elevated Railway. An elevated railway is a rapid transit railway with the tracks above street level on a viaduct or other elevated structure. The railway may be broad-gauge, standard-gauge or narrow-gauge railway, light rail, monorail, or a suspension railway. Elevated railways are normally found in urban areas where there would otherwise be multiple level crossings. Usually, the tracks of elevated railways that run on steel viaducts can be seen from street level. The earliest elevated railway was the London and Greenwich Railway on a brick viaduct of 878 arches, built between 1836 and 1838. The first 2.5 miles of the London and Blackwall Railway was also built on a viaduct. During the 1840s there were other plans for elevated railways in London that never came to fruition. From the late 1860s onward elevated railways became popular in US cities. The New York West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway operated with cable cars from 1868 to 1870, thereafter locomotive-hauled. This was followed by the Manhattan Railway in 1875, the South Side Elevated Railroad, Chicago, and the elevated lines of the Boston Elevated Railway. The Chicago transit system itself is known as L, short for elevated. The Berlin Stadtbahn and the Vienna Stadtbahn are also mainly elevated. The first electric elevated railway was the Liverpool Overhead Railway, which operated through Liverpool docks from 1893 until 1956. In London, the Docklands Light Railway is a modern elevated railway that opened in 1987 and, since, has expanded. The trains are driverless and automatic. Another modern elevated railway is Tokyo's driverless Yurikamome line, opened in 1995. In India, the first elevated railway is opened at 1995 at Chennai Mass Rapid Transit System. Most monorails are elevated railways, such as the Disneyland Monorail System, the Tokyo Monorail, the Sydney Monorail, the KL Monorail, the Las Vegas Monorail, and the Sao Paulo Monorail. Many maglev railways are also elevated. During the 1890s there was some interest in suspension railways, particularly in Germany, with the Schwebebahn Dresden, and the Wuppertal Schwebebahn. H-Bahn suspension railways were built in Dortmund and Dusseldorf airport, 1975. The Memphis Suspension Railway opened in 1982. The Shonan Monorail and the Chiba Urban Monorail in Japan, despite their names, are suspension railways too. Suspension railways are usually monorail. People mover or automated people mover is a type of driverless grade-separated, mass-transit system. The term is generally used only to describe systems that serve as loops or feeder systems, but is sometimes applied to considerably more complex automated systems. Similar to monorails, Bombardier Innovia APM technology uses only one rail to guide the vehicle along the guideway. APMs are common at airports and effective at helping passengers quickly reach their gates. Several elevated APM systems at airports including the PHX Sky Train at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport; AeroTrain at Kuala Lumpur International Airport; and the Tracked Shuttle System at London Gatwick Airport, United Kingdom.
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