EU award for MONOCAB
In October, the EU Commission honoured the North Rhine-Westphalian mobility project MONOCAB with the RegioStars Award in the category ‘A connected Europe’.
MONOCAB is intended to reactivate disused rural railway lines
The idea behind the gyro-stabilised monorail is to revive disused routes in rural areas. The self-propelled cabins are designed for four to six people and travel continuously on one track like a paternoster lift. They can be ordered via an app, thus enabling individual, automated journeys to the next station or town. The partners in the project, which received 3.1 million euros of EU funding, are Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences (TH OWL); Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and the Fraunhofer IOSB-INA research institute. Every year, the Regio Stars Award recognises outstanding, innovative and sustainable projects which contribute to regional development in Europe. The system is expected to be ready for series production by 2032.