Meigs Elevated Railway

The Meigs Elevated Railway was an experimental but unsuccessful 19th century elevated steam-powered urban rapid transit system, often described as a monorail but technically pre-electric third rail. It was invented in the US by Josiah Vincent Meigs (also known as Joe Meigs or Joe Vincent Meigs), of Lowell, Massachusetts, and was demonstrated from 1886 to 1894 in a suburb of Boston called East Cambridge. History Joe Meigs Josiah Vincent Meigs, who answered to "Joe", was born into a well-connected professional family of Nashville, Tennessee (his attorney father was a friend of Abraham Lincoln). He served as captain of the Union Army during the American Civil War, and made a personal appeal to President Lincoln for permission to raise a detachment of black troops for a colored artillery battery. This was the first of such to serve in the war. After the war he was a lawyer at Washington. There he became close friends with a fellow veteran, General Benjamin Butler, and the two moved together to Lowell, Massachusetts where they built adjacent houses. Butler became an influential state politician, and was to serve as governor from 1882. Joe Meigs was proving himself to be a capable inventor, and was responsible for the Meigs rifle as well as taking out several other firearms patents. In the 1880 US census and in the 1889 Lowell city directory, inventor was given as his profession.