Monorail Cat

2006Image macro / lolcatclassic
Monorail Cat is a 2006 lolcat image macro featuring cats sitting on narrow surfaces with legs tucked beneath them, mimicking monorail trains gliding along tracks.

Monorail Cat is a lolcat-era image macro featuring photos of cats sitting on narrow surfaces with their legs tucked beneath them, making them look like monorail trains gliding along a track. The meme originated in November 2006 on the Catmas blog and quickly spread through 4chan's Caturday threads, YTMND, and I Can Has Cheezburger2. It's one of the most recognizable cat memes from the mid-2000s lolcat golden age, and it saw a surprise second life when it went viral on Japanese Twitter in late 20176.

lolcat memescatsimage macro memes4chan memescheezburger network memes

Overview

Monorail Cat is a specific pose meme built around one observation: when a cat sits on a thin ledge, railing, or shelf with all four legs tucked underneath its body and its head resting forward, it looks exactly like a monorail car on a track5. The most iconic version shows a Domestic Longhaired cat balanced atop a sliding shower door, body perfectly elongated along the rail5. The humor comes from the uncanny resemblance and the captions, which treat the cat as an actual transit system. Typical captions include operational updates like "Monorail cat is offline for maintenance" or "Monorail cat has left the station"5.

The meme sits squarely in the lolcat tradition of captioned cat photos with intentionally broken English, a format that dominated internet humor from roughly 2005 to 20104.

The earliest known posting of Monorail Cat appeared on November 2, 2006, on the Catmas blog2. Catmas was a niche web blog started in 2003 by a blogger named Ross, who declared that the first Friday of every October should be dedicated to posting cat pictures on blogs1. The site operated at catmas.com, a domain that had originally been used as an example name in Tucows documentation before being turned into an actual cat celebration site1.

The specific identity of the person who photographed or submitted the original Monorail Cat image is unknown. The Catmas post simply presented the image after a period without new content, noting "it's been a while since we've posted a cat picture, but we're back"2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Catmas blog (source photo), 4chan /b/ (viral spread)
Creator
Unknown
Date
2006

The earliest known posting of Monorail Cat appeared on November 2, 2006, on the Catmas blog. Catmas was a niche web blog started in 2003 by a blogger named Ross, who declared that the first Friday of every October should be dedicated to posting cat pictures on blogs. The site operated at catmas.com, a domain that had originally been used as an example name in Tucows documentation before being turned into an actual cat celebration site.

The specific identity of the person who photographed or submitted the original Monorail Cat image is unknown. The Catmas post simply presented the image after a period without new content, noting "it's been a while since we've posted a cat picture, but we're back".

How It Spread

From Catmas, the image migrated to 4chan's /b/ board, where it fit perfectly into the Caturday tradition. Caturday, the practice of flooding the board with cat images every Saturday, had been running since early 2005 and was one of the key engines behind the entire lolcat movement. Monorail Cat became a staple of these threads.

The meme's next major stop was YTMND, where users created multiple sites featuring the image with looping audio and animations. It also spread to I Can Has Cheezburger, the lolcat aggregation site that launched in January 2007 and turned captioned cat photos into a mainstream phenomenon. By the late 2000s, Monorail Cat had become one of the best-known examples of the image macro cat format, alongside Ceiling Cat, Longcat, and Basement Cat.

People didn't just share the original image. The concept spawned an entire genre: cat owners began photographing their own pets in "monorail style" positions on railings, ledges, armrests, and any narrow surface that could serve as a convincing track. The game Scribblenauts included a Monorail Cat as a hidden object, depicting it as a small Somali cat with no arms or legs that moved surprisingly fast despite having no limbs.

In late 2017, the meme experienced an unexpected revival in Japan. A Japanese Twitter user posted the image with a caption, and it immediately blew up across Japanese Twitter. Similar monorail-style cat photos flooded the platform, and Twitter Japan created a "Twitter Moments" feature about the meme's return. The Japanese revival demonstrated how old Western internet memes could find entirely new audiences in different language spheres years after their original peak.

How to Use This Meme

The Monorail Cat format typically follows a simple formula:

1

Find or photograph a cat sitting on a narrow surface (railing, shelf edge, shower door, fence) with its paws tucked in so the body is streamlined

2

The cat's body should form a smooth, elongated shape along the surface, mimicking a monorail car on its track

3

Add a caption treating the cat as a public transit vehicle. Common caption styles include service announcements ("Monorail cat has left the station"), maintenance updates ("Monorail cat is offline for maintenance"), or capacity notices ("Monorail cat now carries more passengers" for a chubby cat)

Cultural Impact

Monorail Cat's influence extended beyond image macros. The game developer 5th Cell included it as a playable object in the Scribblenauts series, where typing "Monorail Cat" spawns a limbless Somali cat that can move and even attack despite having no legs. In Super Scribblenauts, the character was updated but made less mobile, "probably because it has no limbs". The Scribblenauts inclusion marked one of the earlier examples of internet memes being recognized as cultural vocabulary by game studios.

The meme also played a role in building the broader lolcat ecosystem. Alongside Ceiling Cat, Longcat, Happycat, and others, Monorail Cat helped establish the template for a generation of named cat characters that each represented a single visual gag or pose. This character-driven approach to cat memes laid groundwork for later individual cat celebrities like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub.

Fun Facts

The Catmas blog where Monorail Cat first appeared got its domain name from Tucows documentation, where "catmas.com" was used as a placeholder example URL before someone registered it for real.

Caturday, the 4chan tradition that helped spread Monorail Cat, predates most of the lolcat infrastructure. The domain "caturday.com" was registered on April 30, 2005, before "lolcat" was even a recognized term.

In Scribblenauts, Monorail Cat is categorized as a Somali cat breed, has "very low offense" in combat, and can surprisingly attack despite having no visible limbs.

The word "lolcat" was a runner-up for the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year in 2007, losing out to "Googlegänger".

Derivatives & Variations

Transit-themed captions:

Users developed an entire vocabulary of fake monorail service announcements, treating different cat poses as different operational states. A sleeping cat meant "offline for maintenance," a cat walking away meant "has left the station," and a kitten tied to toy tracks meant "hurry, monorail cat is coming"[5].

Fat cat variants:

Overweight cats in the monorail position were captioned "Monorail cat now carries more passengers," playing on the expanded body size[5].

Japanese Twitter revival (2017):

Japanese users created their own monorail cat photos and captions, generating enough volume that Twitter Japan featured the trend in a Moments collection[6].

Scribblenauts character:

An in-game representation across multiple Scribblenauts titles, depicted as a limbless cat with unique movement behavior[3].

Frequently Asked Questions

Monorail Cat

2006Image macro / lolcatclassic
Monorail Cat is a 2006 lolcat image macro featuring cats sitting on narrow surfaces with legs tucked beneath them, mimicking monorail trains gliding along tracks.

Monorail Cat is a lolcat-era image macro featuring photos of cats sitting on narrow surfaces with their legs tucked beneath them, making them look like monorail trains gliding along a track. The meme originated in November 2006 on the Catmas blog and quickly spread through 4chan's Caturday threads, YTMND, and I Can Has Cheezburger. It's one of the most recognizable cat memes from the mid-2000s lolcat golden age, and it saw a surprise second life when it went viral on Japanese Twitter in late 2017.

lolcat memes cats image macro memes 4chan memes cheezburger network memes

Overview

Monorail Cat is a specific pose meme built around one observation: when a cat sits on a thin ledge, railing, or shelf with all four legs tucked underneath its body and its head resting forward, it looks exactly like a monorail car on a track. The most iconic version shows a Domestic Longhaired cat balanced atop a sliding shower door, body perfectly elongated along the rail. The humor comes from the uncanny resemblance and the captions, which treat the cat as an actual transit system. Typical captions include operational updates like "Monorail cat is offline for maintenance" or "Monorail cat has left the station".

The meme sits squarely in the lolcat tradition of captioned cat photos with intentionally broken English, a format that dominated internet humor from roughly 2005 to 2010.

The earliest known posting of Monorail Cat appeared on November 2, 2006, on the Catmas blog. Catmas was a niche web blog started in 2003 by a blogger named Ross, who declared that the first Friday of every October should be dedicated to posting cat pictures on blogs. The site operated at catmas.com, a domain that had originally been used as an example name in Tucows documentation before being turned into an actual cat celebration site.

The specific identity of the person who photographed or submitted the original Monorail Cat image is unknown. The Catmas post simply presented the image after a period without new content, noting "it's been a while since we've posted a cat picture, but we're back".

Origin & Background

Platform
Catmas blog (source photo), 4chan /b/ (viral spread)
Creator
Unknown
Date
2006

The earliest known posting of Monorail Cat appeared on November 2, 2006, on the Catmas blog. Catmas was a niche web blog started in 2003 by a blogger named Ross, who declared that the first Friday of every October should be dedicated to posting cat pictures on blogs. The site operated at catmas.com, a domain that had originally been used as an example name in Tucows documentation before being turned into an actual cat celebration site.

The specific identity of the person who photographed or submitted the original Monorail Cat image is unknown. The Catmas post simply presented the image after a period without new content, noting "it's been a while since we've posted a cat picture, but we're back".

How It Spread

From Catmas, the image migrated to 4chan's /b/ board, where it fit perfectly into the Caturday tradition. Caturday, the practice of flooding the board with cat images every Saturday, had been running since early 2005 and was one of the key engines behind the entire lolcat movement. Monorail Cat became a staple of these threads.

The meme's next major stop was YTMND, where users created multiple sites featuring the image with looping audio and animations. It also spread to I Can Has Cheezburger, the lolcat aggregation site that launched in January 2007 and turned captioned cat photos into a mainstream phenomenon. By the late 2000s, Monorail Cat had become one of the best-known examples of the image macro cat format, alongside Ceiling Cat, Longcat, and Basement Cat.

People didn't just share the original image. The concept spawned an entire genre: cat owners began photographing their own pets in "monorail style" positions on railings, ledges, armrests, and any narrow surface that could serve as a convincing track. The game Scribblenauts included a Monorail Cat as a hidden object, depicting it as a small Somali cat with no arms or legs that moved surprisingly fast despite having no limbs.

In late 2017, the meme experienced an unexpected revival in Japan. A Japanese Twitter user posted the image with a caption, and it immediately blew up across Japanese Twitter. Similar monorail-style cat photos flooded the platform, and Twitter Japan created a "Twitter Moments" feature about the meme's return. The Japanese revival demonstrated how old Western internet memes could find entirely new audiences in different language spheres years after their original peak.

How to Use This Meme

The Monorail Cat format typically follows a simple formula:

1

Find or photograph a cat sitting on a narrow surface (railing, shelf edge, shower door, fence) with its paws tucked in so the body is streamlined

2

The cat's body should form a smooth, elongated shape along the surface, mimicking a monorail car on its track

3

Add a caption treating the cat as a public transit vehicle. Common caption styles include service announcements ("Monorail cat has left the station"), maintenance updates ("Monorail cat is offline for maintenance"), or capacity notices ("Monorail cat now carries more passengers" for a chubby cat)

Cultural Impact

Monorail Cat's influence extended beyond image macros. The game developer 5th Cell included it as a playable object in the Scribblenauts series, where typing "Monorail Cat" spawns a limbless Somali cat that can move and even attack despite having no legs. In Super Scribblenauts, the character was updated but made less mobile, "probably because it has no limbs". The Scribblenauts inclusion marked one of the earlier examples of internet memes being recognized as cultural vocabulary by game studios.

The meme also played a role in building the broader lolcat ecosystem. Alongside Ceiling Cat, Longcat, Happycat, and others, Monorail Cat helped establish the template for a generation of named cat characters that each represented a single visual gag or pose. This character-driven approach to cat memes laid groundwork for later individual cat celebrities like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub.

Fun Facts

The Catmas blog where Monorail Cat first appeared got its domain name from Tucows documentation, where "catmas.com" was used as a placeholder example URL before someone registered it for real.

Caturday, the 4chan tradition that helped spread Monorail Cat, predates most of the lolcat infrastructure. The domain "caturday.com" was registered on April 30, 2005, before "lolcat" was even a recognized term.

In Scribblenauts, Monorail Cat is categorized as a Somali cat breed, has "very low offense" in combat, and can surprisingly attack despite having no visible limbs.

The word "lolcat" was a runner-up for the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year in 2007, losing out to "Googlegänger".

Derivatives & Variations

Transit-themed captions:

Users developed an entire vocabulary of fake monorail service announcements, treating different cat poses as different operational states. A sleeping cat meant "offline for maintenance," a cat walking away meant "has left the station," and a kitten tied to toy tracks meant "hurry, monorail cat is coming"[5].

Fat cat variants:

Overweight cats in the monorail position were captioned "Monorail cat now carries more passengers," playing on the expanded body size[5].

Japanese Twitter revival (2017):

Japanese users created their own monorail cat photos and captions, generating enough volume that Twitter Japan featured the trend in a Moments collection[6].

Scribblenauts character:

An in-game representation across multiple Scribblenauts titles, depicted as a limbless cat with unique movement behavior[3].

Frequently Asked Questions