A horse monorail

Revolutionising UK racehorse pre-training.

In a picturesque and quiet village of Lambourn, West Berkshire, a revolutionary development has been taking place at the Kingwood Stud, a premier horse training facility owned by racehorse owner and breeder Mehmet Kurt.

Kingwood Stud is set to open the new Kurtsystems – a £20m pre-training system designed to provide controlled and synchronised exercise for young racehorses, to develop stronger bones, cartilages, muscles and tendons before they enter a traditional training regime.

SCWS – a Joseph Ash Galvanizing client – has been one of the contractors on the project, and Joseph Ash Chesterfield hot dip galvanized their steel.

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Kurtsystems is tipped to revolutionise racehorse training and is the first of its kind in the UK. The idea was developed by Mehmet Kurt after 20 plus years of researching horses, and testing a protoype near Istanbul in Turkey. 

How it works

Horses are trained on an artificial surface training circuit, without jockeys, by being harnessed into specially designed ‘cabins’ which travel along an overhead rail track at set speeds. The speeds are managed by a computer controlled unit at the back of the cabins. The horses carry specialist saddles to replicate the weight of a jockey.

It is a mile-long circuit which can train up to 12 horses at a time. It can also be used to rehabilitate injured horses.

SCWS and Joseph Ash Galvanizing’s involvement

The architect for Kurtsystems is Sutton Griffin (based in Newbury), and the main contractor is Raymond Brown Construction Limited (based in Hamsphire). The monorail cars were designed by automotive engineers, Revolve Technologies (based in Essex). And SCWS (based in Norfolk) fabricated 411 tonnes of structural steel. SCWS then contracted Joseph Ash Chesterfield to treat the steel to promote its longevity.

The steel

The structural steel consisted of:

• 400 circular columns, all 5 meters long and collectively weighing 281 tonnes.
• 200 rectangular rafters, all 8.5 metres in length and collectively weighing 164 tonnes. This included large welded channel details to form the base of the curved roof, which meant the height of the rafters was over 2.4m.
• 400 x steel rail, 114mm in diameter and 6.8 metres long and collectively weighing 29 tonnes.

The 400 circular columns, the rectangular rafters and steel rail were all galvanized by Joseph Ash Chesterfield.

It was a big project for SCWS and Joseph Ash Chesterfield, and one that was completed successfully and on-time.

The future of Kurtsystems

The technology will start operating in 2017.

We send Kingwood Stud best wishes for the new project.