[from an earlier post]: . . . Now, before I bore my friends even sillier, what I’ll offer in the way of a description of how IMHO monorails do (and do not) work in the USA. I’ve written this up as a separate post in the TRANSIT section. Of course, this leaves me easy prey to those maurauding gangs of monorail-mavens scourging the landscape, but I enjoy being corrected. - a.s.
Apparently (almost) everyone’s notion that a monorail is a singularly modern and space-age way to move people
stems from two sources: the original monorail built in Wuppertal (near Duesseldorf), Germany around the turn of
the previous century; and the fondness shown by the Walt Disney people for Alweg-brand monorails into and out of
their theme parks since about 1960. (I know nothing about the Seattle system except that it looks Alweg-ish, but I
don’t know and won’t comment.)
The German invention isn’t as much a “one-rail” system as it is a kind of horizontal funicular (recalling that funiculars
had been in service hauling people up and down Western European mountains for more than a decade prior to
1900). The Wuppertal system hauls itself horizontally, using coglike wheels, over semirigid cable (it’s not a cable car
I don’t care about monorails either way, but you’ve got a bunch of facts wrong.
1: The Disneyland monorails are Alweg built and are a special design. The Walt Disney World monorails are built by bombardier, they are bigger and are compatible with the systems in Seattle and Vegas. Disneyland is in the process of upgrading their Mark IV monorails which was a chore because they had to be specially made. WDW can just buy them from the Canucks.
2: The Disneyland MK IV monorails must have each car opened individually though they all close automaticallly. The WDW/Bombardier MKVI monorails open and close from a single button.
3: The DIsneyland monorails, because they run on a smaller track are sitting room only. The WDW, Vegas and Seattle monorails accomidating standing room.
4: The Vegas Monorail runs from the back of MGM all the way down to the other end of the strip, not just past a few hotels. There are only 2 trams that I’m aware of. The first runs from Excalibur, through Luxor to Mandalay bay. The other is similar only hitting like 3 hotels on the other end of the strip. The trams both mostly run through parkinglots.
5: The vegas monorail runs mostly through parkinglots. There are condos and additional hotels going up around it, but it would be a mistake to say that’s true for the entire length of the route.
I am indebted to YoHo for his vigorous updating of my factual remarks. I have no intention of arguing against the facts he mustered; nonetheless, it bears repeating that I draw from my own experience, which would be Disneyland and Seattle never, Disney World in the mid-1980s and Las Vegas several times, the most recent 2005.
Clearly my factual knowledge is out of date but not necessarily wrong in its own time-frame.&nb
As practical transportation the Las Vegas Monorail is a good case of not so good. It runs from nowhere to nowhere and is about as useful to the average Las Vegas resident or visitor as jeans on a sidewinder. Its biggest value is as mobile billboards!
The system connecting three casinos at the south end of the Strip is a horizontal cable run that owes a lot more to elevator and roller coaster technology than it does to monorail technology.
OTOH, in Japan, there are a number of successful monorail operations:
The oldest, from central Tokyo to the old airport, has run successfully for many years as a better answer than taxis (which were slower and more expensive) for people going to catch planes. Its multiple stations also make it useful for reaching points between, and it connects directly with the main Tokyo rail transit system.
A newer one, in Tachikawa, seems to have been built with the specific needs of commuters and shoppers in mind, connecting several bedroom communities to the main transit system and the Tachikawa business district.
There are six other urban (commuter oriented) systems in Japan, plus the inevitable Disney operation and two others in parks/zoos.
I don’t know what the Japanese know that we haven’t figured out yet. I wish I did!
Chuck, thanks for the deal-sealers on the Las Vegas monorail and the casino-based systems. I wish I had expressed myself so succinctly. The horizontal-cable-driven “trams” of those casino-based systems remind me for all the world of what the Tampa, FL airport uses (or “used” as of the early 1980s) to get departing passengers from terminal to airplane: rather than tromp down a long jetwing, they would assemble in a horizontal “carriage” that looked all the world to me like one of the casino-
The Tampa airport installation you mention does still run, I was there in May 2007, but I wouldn’t call it a monorail, even though http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/Tampa.html says it is. It sure seems like conventional airport people mover rubber tired electric traction to me
There are 2 concrete pathways that the rubber tired wheels follow, I would have called them rails if steel wheels ran on them, which would make Tampa a duorail and not a monorail.
A minor correction. The Wuppertal Schwebebahn (suspended monorail) has nothing to do with cable-cars or cog-railways. The motor cars - there neither coaches nor locomotives for passenger-trains - have electric motors that drive wheels, similar to a tramway.
The Schwebebahn (there is a homepage in German dedicated to it) still runs in revenue-service. There are no plans to abandon it. It hat been damaged in the bombings of WW II, but rebuilt after it. A couple of years ago, the Schwebebahn got new articulated motor-cars. Actually, automatic service and the acquisition of new rolling-stock is under discussion. BTW the Schwebebahn is so old they still have a car on which the then emperor of Germany, William II, rode.
Linguistic quibble: in my high school German class I remember learning that Shwebebahn literally means ‘hanging rail’, which we tend to translate into colloquial American English, as you did, as ‘suspended monorail’. That’s similar to German Strassenbahn, literally ‘street rail’ or as we say in English ‘street car’, Eisenbahn ‘iron rail’ or again as we say in English ‘rail road’.
U-bahn, Unterbahn or Untergrundbahn literally means ‘under rail’ or ‘underground rail’, that’s the German term for a subway, but some bad translators might have thought that meant a single rail under the vehicle. I don’t know if there is actually a German word for a supported, vs a suspended or hanging, monorail, but I did look up the German translation for the English word monorail, the dictionary says Einscheinenbahn. My memory of high school German makes me want to translate that as ‘one shining rail’.
All I can say is that the Germans themselves use therm Schwebebahn to refer to the Wuppertal system. Look up the infinitive, “schweben” in any German-English dictionary and it will translate something like “to hang or be in balance suspended.” I suggested in an earlier post that “dangle” might be used for the “Schwebe-” prefix, not to be hanged, of course, but to hang suspended, as it were. - a.s.
PS: I have a masters in German from Northwestern University. Unfortunately, I cannot at the moment find my best dictionary.
The ALWEG monorail was first tested in a suburb of Cologne, Germany. Its name refers to Axel Wennergren, a wealthy Swedish citizen who was then interested in the development of this particular type of monorail.
The big attraction of monorails is that they LOOK futuristic. They are so decidedly different from more conventional and more practical forms of rail transit that people tend to gravitate to them as the wave of the future.
MON-RAIL/MAGLEV makes great reading but its higly impractical, It may look good around Disney World epcot center or Disneyland. there are some dreamers here in Colorado who woud have the tax payers of Colorado ante up billions on a science fiction dream. This pipe dream would be a Mag/lev-monorail to carry skiers and other winter sports nuts from Denver International Airport via a parelell route of the current I-70 to the vail beaver creek resort. The grades would be even daunting to regular railroad engineers. Plus how would this technology not tried in moutains, handle adverse snows blizzards and avalanches. I been to seattle, and their almost fifty year old mono-is a slow joke. The mag lev monorail technology so far is great for short flat distances. and not distane of twenty five miles or more. Lets do more research and improvement on standard rail technology
I quite agree – the only successful ongoing mag lev op seems to be the airport - Shanghai(?) sytem in China. But keep in mind that that country is still a commmand (authoritarian) communist system, which can dedicate unreal amounts of money to something it prizes. Also, the Chinese are still among the most restrictive in terms of photographing infrastructure and transportation – so how is bad news going to get out if the news and foreign e-mail features on your Internet simply don’t function.
We may fuss about them, but I would cite France as one of the few democracies that has spent its money on results, now showmanship. Would that we in America had a teensy bit of the spirit of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo moon missions. Sadly, too many of our contrymen are lazy or ostrich-like about the news. And railroads aren’t sexy.
Pity as well that more people can’t make it to France or Germany or Japan or China to see what’s going on with HST. But with our falling dollar, fewer and fewer of us can afford it. OTOH there are probably Europeans and Asians visiting here for the first time who snicker over the quaint, breakdown-prone irrelevance of our LD trains and the not-quite-fresh technology of the NEC. - a. s.
Monorail only runs as an elevated. Sure, you could put a single rail on the ground, but then what would be the advantage over two rails on the ground?
Dual rail is flexible, can be elevated, on the surface, or in a subway. It can share a lane with automobiles and buses, track in pavement. It can share (the same line even) a track with a freight railroad. It can share a track, especially in station areas, with high speed rail. Switches are easier to construct and take less maintenance to operate.
As an elevated, it is certainly possible to design an elevated light rail (ELR) that has no more of a shadow print on the ground than a monorail. Simply support each of the running rails directly off the longitudinal girders without any crossties. Like Charles Harvey’s original cable driven West Side Patent Elevated Railroad on Greenwich Street and Ninth Avenue from DeBrossey Street to 34 th Street in Manhattan in 1869.
A piece of rail is Schiene. The lamps on a locomotive are referred to as Scheinwerfer. Hope this helps some. This is one of those moments that I find it difficult to actually translate the German verb ‘scheinen’ or its Dutch counterpart ‘schijnen’. Shine does not completely match it I think.
