CHESTER Zoo is to consign its famous monorail - once ridden by Royalty and a member of Take That - to the history books.

On the zoo's website, visitors are told that no visit is complete "without a ride on our Zoofari Monorail".

But with several multi-million projects in the pipeline the zoo has outgrown the monorail system, first opened in 1991, and it "no longer fits our vision for a world-class modern zoo".

The Queen took a trip on it when she visited in 2012, and it has allowed visitors to take in the black rhinos, Tsavo bird aviary, roan antelope, zebras, capybaras, tapirs, bats bridge, lions, giant otters, penguins, flamingos, lemurs, onagers, camels, greater one-horned rhino, Philippine spotted deer, and Asian elephants.

Gary Barlow is one of the famous people who has taken a ride.

In this month's members magazine, a zoo spokesman said: "It has been part of the zoo for nearly three decades but since its installation in 1991 the zoo has grown in size and the transportation system now doesn't even cover half of the 125 acres."

Border Counties Advertizer:

The monorail was opened in 1991 by HRH Duchess of Kent

In recent years the monorail has been plagued with reliability issues.

And even when the monorail was opened by the Duchess of Kent it broke down on its first ever trip around the zoo while the duchess was still onboard..

The spokesman added: "Over the last few years we have experienced both system and train failures so this once state-of-the-art system is proving costly to maintain and unreliable for visitors."

Monorails have never really caught on in the UK. The oldest can be found, and ridden, at Beulieu National Motor Museum and monorails, or skytrains, are part of the transport networks in larger cities like London and Glasgow.

And further afield, the monorail has put places like Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook on the map.