English: I found this old picture in my fathers old photo album. He lived in his youth in Ballybunion, Co. Kerry, Ireland. The pictures are from the beginning of the 20th century. My father died in 1996. So I can´t ask him from whom he got the pictures.
I remember that I saw a waggon of this train on a farm near Ballybunion in 1990. The waggon was still a wreck. But it stands on a part of the railway.
The Lartigue Monorail system was invented by the French engineer Charles Lartigue (1834-1907). The most famous Lartigue railway was the Listowel and Ballybunion Railway. This was a 14.4-km (9-mi) monorail built on the Lartigue principle in County Kerry in Ireland. It linked Listowel and Ballybunion; it opened on 1 March 1888.
The locomotives were of the 0-6-0 type (strictly speaking, '0-3-0'), constructed by the Hunslet Engine Company. They were specially built with two boilers in order to balance on the track. Loads also had to be evenly balanced. If a farmer wanted to send a cow to market, he would have to send two calves to balance it, which would travel back on opposite sides of the same freight wagon, thereby balancing each other.
Another problem with using the Lartigue system in populated areas was that, due to the track's design, it was not possible to build level crossings. In order for a road to cross the track, a kind of double-sided drawbridge had to be constructed, which required an attendant to operate it.
The line closed in 1924 after the track was damaged during the Irish Civil War, and everything was scrapped except a short section of the track.