Monorail article from 1956

Thanks to the Internet Archive I have been reading some of Willy Ley’s science columns in Galaxy magazine, and came across this: https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v12n02_1956-06/page/n49/mode/2up

It devotes considerable space to the Wuppertal Schwebebahn and to the effforts of George Bennie to build a monorail propelled by an aircraft engine and propeller.

More on Wuppertal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Schwebebahn

More on the Bennie Railplane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennie_Railplane

More on Willy Ley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_Ley

These things are really from another era of reality, in which enormous sums of capital and, by implication, large amounts of cheap labor were available for large projects – and in which right-of-way costs were deemed high (or “free” right-of-way was available, or as in Bennie’s system a railroad line’s ‘air rights’ were usable) but there was no concern about immediate neighbors’ rights (as there was not for even the cheapest and noisiest elevated railroads). Willy Ley hints he’s going to get around to mentioning something like this about the ‘special considerations’ for the Schwebebahn as built, but what he mentions is others.

Bennie never really addressed how he was going to handle cars passing on his system (more than a little reminiscent of one of the whopper problems with the Beach vacuum subway as touted) particularly the issue of swing-out on curves if the 'inner’car is traveling much faster than the ‘outer’ one as they pass. There is also the issue, as on the Kruckenberg Schienenzeppelin to a slightly lesser but still important extent, of how you keep folks out of the airscrews when they come too near them, or away from dust or trash thrown by them.

Nte the reference in passing to the propeller-driven railcar in Palestine during WWI, something we were recently discussing in another thread.

Note too the idea for transit in the median of the Hollywood Freeway, something that looks very different now than it would have in the mid-Fifties. I do admit I have to shake my head at anyone who advocates 6fpsps acceleration for a transit vehicle!

There should be a discussion in the relevant volume of the ACI concrete handbook

regarding passing trains on a monorail, I’ve seen it done in Wuppertal- the whole track structure moves to bring cars into and out of the shed at one end of the line. It was fascinating to watch- How is it done at Disneyland?

As a boy attending the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962, I loved the monorail. Before that, I had only seen film of a monorail at Disneyland.

Back then, it was another vision of the future that meant so much to us as kids growing up in the Sputnik era.

OM: Perhaps the economical Chinese viaduct system could also be used to elevate HSR and HrSR lines here above existing lines to largely segregate them from low-speed freight?

Alweg is a straddle-beam system with side-bearing alignment, and the company patented a couple of methods, including a ‘segmented switch’ that physically curves as it move. You can see description and video here.

Incidentally any Alweg-like straddle-beam system is likely to be able to use a Listowel & Ballybunion-style rotating switch(which works fascinatingly like the steam ports in a Corliss valve) to do the equivalent of slip switching between two routes…

Incidentally the study Ley referenced in the Galaxy article was not at all related to the later Alweg ‘free construction’ proposal (and its counterproposal with suspended-car technology for nearly twice the route-mileage at about $5M lower total cost) in the early Sixties. The one that started circa 1947 was formally proposed by Coverdale and Colpitts (the company that put out the streamlined-train reports) at the beginning of 1954 – quoted cost then was $165M, and it was to run up along the median of the Hollywood Expressway, I believe using a split-rail box-beam system.

Here’s a story from the Saturday Evening Post in mid-1964 that covers a couple of objective points usually not mentioned in the typical ‘Standard Oil and GM lobbied it out of existence’ discussion. When you look at the actual history of things, Alweg was neither really able to contract for so substantial a construction job nor likely to sell the 79-million destination-pair tickets per year necessary for break-even … even with the proposed access to tax-free bonds and their perceiv

Here’s a Google map blurry image of some of the turnouts on the monorail at Disneyworld. I remember passing turnouts on the system. It looked like the entire concrete track shifted over.

Here is a shot of the switch at Newark Airport’s Airtrain

It is one of the only practical ways such a thing can be done at present.

I had a number of approaches for building extended viaducts with top-down-aligned track structure in the '70s, some of which involved active springing in the track support along the lines of what the Germans were doing in the early 1920s. Much of the support was designed as a modular double-hollow-box-beam structure under the rails, precast to have the appropriate vertical curvature profile for high speed, with variable spring supports for fine track leveling by semi-automated machinery – this was in the days that JNR was reported to be spending almost a billion dollars a year just to reline and resurface the '60s-era Shin Kansen lines every 6 weeks or so, as needed. There are much better high-speed track systems commercialized since then!

Another advantage of the beam system was that little more ‘ballasting’ of new ROW was required than to provide a trench with vaults and careful drainage ‘at grade’ – you could slip-form the walls and base, and cast in the anchor points for the springing and damping. All subsequent track-geometry adjustments would take place in variable elements or via permanent reprofiling like cellular permanent flat-jacks with self-leveling tremie fill.

Arguably the number of ‘flyovers’ needed to accommodate major roads and freight-railroad crossings, whether or not you reserve (as I think you should with HrSR) the ability to interchange traffic with ‘historical’ railroads and perhaps even light or regional rail consists, is relatively small for ‘regional high speed’ (that’s up to PRIIA current standards, 125mph, not just 110mph) and I continue to believe that even rudimen

OM, it almost reminds me of southern Louisiana bridge building. The concrete sections are all pre-made. They are moved to position and lifted into place.

After the hurricanes, the concrete bridges are repaired almost immediately with new sections which have been stockpiled.

After looking at he cross section on page 58, it occurs to me to ask if the rail head and/or the wheel tread could be profiled to be self centering, or is that function entirely carried out by the wheel flanges? If it is self centering, does this require periodic rail grinding and wheel turning?

That is correct, and more interesting than that, each section may be very precisely designed to go in a particular location, with the ‘launching’ set up to accommodate custom configuration. The ACI article in the 1995 edition of the handbook placed a great deal of emphasis on the Vancouver SkyTrain elevated guideway sections involving a great deal of ‘unexpected’ custom fabrication; the point is that it is relatively simple to coordinate engineering CAD with much of the production process used to make sections in the required quantities in modern practice.

Alternatively, of course, it is fully practical to build the guideway with standard components and handle any careful top-down track alignment as would be done with any ballasted roadbed, if that is effective enough while cheaper/faster. Keep in mind that there is much more careful lining, surfacing, and horizontal/vertical spiraling involved in high-speed track, and in my opinion somewhere between 125mph and 150mph is the point where it begins to look very attractive to incorporate the fundamental profiling in the guideway structure rather than the ballast or the track construction itself…

Biggest stub switch I’ve ever seen!

GATX, the company which stencils those initials on railroad tank cars, once had an R&D division named GARD that started out as one of those standalone university-affiliated labs. Most of their work was bidding on one-of Federal contracts to build stuff, but their big in-house idea was the RRollway ultra-wide gauge, wide-body side-loading, high-speed automobile ferry. This was the brainchild of Deodat Clejan who originated a piggyback end-loading (circus loading) system.

On this project, Dad had patented a guidance system for the wide-gauge two-steel-rail trackway. Instead of using solid axle connections between cone-tapered wheels for steering, the wheels were independently rotating and the guidance came from a second set of wheels that gripped one of the rails from the side. This was sort of a “continuous flange contact” guidance, only the “flanges” were low-friction rollers.

That system got rid of all of the problems to get cone-tapered-wheel guidance to work at high speed including the insane level of maintenance done in Japan reported here by Overmod, but I remember Dad talking about it 50 years ago.

On the other hand, the trackway couldn’t use convention points-and-frogs switch as this would foul the guide wheels. So the RRollway was in one sense just a broad-gauge railroad, but it needed a kind of stub switch arrangement for shifting the rails in the way the picture shows an Alweg monorail line shifting cement beams.

To me, the funniest RRollway story had to do with one of the research engineers at GARD who Mom never liked. The underlying truth is that Dad couldn’t stand him, but Dad was the kind of guy who “never expressed his feelings” only from his accounts of what was taking place at work, Mom scoped out the Dad was really annoyed with his co-worker. Women can be she-wolf level of protective of not just their kids but also their spouses, and Mom’s snark about that guy at Dad’s work was part of that.

A third guy from GARD once related how two of the engineers rode in an automobile in an autorack car in a freight train to get some first-hand experience of the proposed passengers-ride-in-their-own-automobile concept. A freight car, at speed, really sways and bounces around. My informant was a kid I knew in high school, and I never asked how he knew how a freight car rides, but maybe you see where this story is going.

Now in another thread about Amtrak’s Auto Train service, my fine compatriots commenting on what I described about RRollway along with a proposed US-DOT proposal for a ride-in-car Northeast-Florida service, told me that ride-in-you-own-automobile is lame. Now I know there are many fine people who are train enthusiast who think riding in a “chair car” deep-reclining coach seat seated next to sniffling strangers is a better experience than being cooped up in your own automobile with your own sniffling children, whether rolling down the rails in an auto-carrier passenger car or you driving it down the Interstate. But don’t blame me, I am reporting what the thinking was back in the 1960s about various solutions to the “transportation congestion crisis.”

So of the two engineers riding in the freight-train autorack, the guy who Mom didn’t like suffered from motion sickness and he threw up. As a kid, I thought karma was somehow involved – Mom generally liked people, and if she didn’t lik

Riding in your own vehicle on a train presents a comfort problem for the real world - heating and cooling of the interior of said vehicle for the comfort of the occupants. I suspect operating the auto’s engine would be a ‘non-starter’ from the safety aspect of carbon monoxide poisioning - while the train may be moving - what is the condition of the air inside the railcar. Secondly, what would be the visual stimulation for the people inside their own vehicle for their 12 - 16 or more hour journey. Thirdly what are the sanitary facilities of those in their vehicles for the duration of the journey.

Undocumented ‘passengers’ don’t expect the ki

I know it’s been brought up before, but this thread reminds me of the Mexico Copper Canyon rail line.

You could park your camper on a flat car and ride the train. I remember pictures of people sitting outside their camper on lawn chairs, riding the rail. I always thought that would be great.

In Alaska, my bus tour involved parking the bus on a flatcar and riding for a while through a tunnel. We stayed on the bus the whole way, but I don’t remember it being very rough or wavy.

Back to Monorails – I know there are downsides to the whole concept, but I sure wish it was possible to build those and use them efficiently. They were such a vision of the great technological future for us when we were kids.

But - as kids what did we know of reality and how things actually work?