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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
--the locomotion is provided by the train, not the cable). "Die Schwebebahn" is almost as much fun to observe than
to ride, as it dodges around and about pre-existing factories and offices, making use of back alleys, small streets and
narrow air spaces -- like an El but much more maneuverable. (If you've seen European streetcar sets flash thru
narrow streets and alleys and wonder how they can pass so closely without crashing into one another, you'll know the
sensation.) I don't know if the Wuppertal monorail is still in service but it was still in service in 1980 and already
more than 75 years old--the cars too, I'd guess. In German, the verb "schweben" means "to dangle, as a pendant" so
that's why they named the Wuppertal system a dangle-bahn, not a uni-bahn or a one-bahn. (The German word for
our conception of a mono-rail(q.v.) might also translate something like "Einbahn," recalling that in German a
unicorn is "ein Einhorn".)
The closest functional equivalent in America that I know of was the horizontal-cable model built by AMF and used in
the 1963-64 World's Fair out at Flushing Meadow. As in Wuppertal, the system hauled itself via cogs spinning on
cable above. I don't know if it was quite as maneuverable as the Wuppertal system but it certainly hauled a lot of
people -- while it lasted.
The opposing "snake-on-a-rail" system was developed by a company named Alweg in the late fifties and still sees
service at both Disneyland and Disney World (where it notably scoots thru the lobby of the Contemporary Hotel
without stirring up any dust or trash--mostly 'cuz dust and trash are illegal in Disney World). There is or was as well
a sea-green example of Alweg that runs or ran with its terminus in the back yard of the MGM Grand and extended
only a couple of casinos away. If so, it's the only one in L.V. that I know of; nowadays short-distance people movers
commonly called "trams" in Vegas do the job of hauling people shortish distances through the 110-degree heat from
one building to another (example: Treasure Island to Luxor.)
There are severe impediments to putting any such system into American practice. For one thing, we still haven't
entirely disproved Sam Insull's crack that "straphangers pay the dividends [or shrink the deficits]" on mass transit
and the Alweg system is built so that no standees are possible: it's a closely sealed-in cabin, much tighter than
the smallest private jet. The other obstacle comes from that architecture: all doors/hatches have to be closed,
manually, from the outside, one worker to each portal, and there are a lot of portals. So all we'd have to do to put
such a system into common American urban practice is (a) totally rewrite most American air-rights legislation; (b)
condemn all but about six inches' less width than a now-conventional people-mover would require; (c) conscript the
entire cast of "Up With People" and their equally shining, culotte-wearing, cheerful children, who exist only to
supervise the loading/unloading and closing of hatches and basically have nothing to do between trains.
By contrast, the current Vegas Monorail is in essence a people-mover, except that its motive power begins as
sideways or transverse as mentioned above. I can't imagine it would have been any less expensive or called for the
condemnation of many fewer inches of width than a conventional people-mover on the Detroit or O'Hare Airport
model (whose concrete support-towers, just like Monorail's, is a single-post "Y" design.)
What a shame that the people who get to build public transit in Las Vegas are split on meeting the needs of casino
workers versus intriguing the visitors! If you haven't been to Vegas in a number of years, the old casinos don't have
any "back yards" left, due to the imposition of million-dollar high-rise combos, retail, and another layer or two of
casinos. The old Travelodge-type housing used by thrifty tourists and short-term workers is no more. The workers
have to be freighted in, and now transversing Las Vegas Blvd. (the "Strip") are articulated diesel buses that run very
close together. In fact, that's practically the transit engineer's description of the kind of route best served by trolley-
coaches (or "Trackless Trolley" if you're from the East). Think how much longer the rolling stock would last, and how
much the use of electricity would lessen the already-bad smog and dirty air in the L.V. basin, that is now coming to
resemble more and more Los Angeles in the Sixties. Another possibility, and one with more visual appeal (tho'
lacking in "curb appeal" -- read on) would be LRT running down the center of the Strip, hopefully not ripping out
those impressive palm trees in the process. I imagine that the stops could have been incorporated into the now-very
-common overhead bridges meant for pedestrians trying to cross the Strip (to get to either "curb" - lol). Even the
basic fare could be somewhat expensive, with discount monthly passes available to residents and workers, like entry-
level casino workers. And as for the airport, given its exponential growth, I'm not sure whether anything other than a 24-hour, above-ground RT of the "Metro" variety would suffice at this point. - a.s.
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.
YoHo1975 wrote: 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.
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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.
1. Clearly my factual knowledge is out of date but not necessarily wrong in its own time-frame. I've only been to one Disney park (WDW/Florida) and remember quite well the hatch-type monorails gliding through the Contemporary Hotel (perhaps they call it a Resort) and the cheerful staffers working the hatches. Certainly I'm thrilled if WDW went with something larger and more practical in the meantime. I don't think the updating took place until a few years had elaped from my visit; I'm not even sure Bombardier was in the business of building (or building in co-production in the USA) heavy transit so early in the Eighties. I am not sure if the Alweg company is still in business. I vaguely recall that "ALWEG" was a German acronym for the product, but since my memory clearly can fool me sometimes, I don't put that out as a presumed fact.
2. Again, the improved Bombardier models sound impressive. Anyone out there with a photo?
3. I specifically mentioned standees on the L.V. system in my post, although I may have metaphorized them as "straphangers."
4. Actually there is another tram I rode in 2005 -- if it bears such an elevated (no pun intended) title. It's a people-mover that serves only to shuttle people from Treasure Island to the Mirage, which at that time were commonly owned. YoHo is right on the money about the other trams and the MGM Grand monorail. Now, the Grand's green model (in 2005) looked a lot like an Alweg. (BTW I also remember the air-conditioning didn't work very well.) Could it be some other company's rendering of what began as an Alweg patent, perhaps modified or updated?
5. I don't know what leads YoHo to infer that I denied that the Vegas Monorail has many of its support pillars in parking lots. One hopes that the Strip area will not become so ridiculously overcrowded that the laws of the market put new imitation two-story Travelodges hard up against, or wrapping around as a courtyard, the support pillars. (Although anyone who has visited Manhattan's DUMBO district [Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass] knows that an entire neighborhood can exist under the infrastructure given enough height and enough space constraints brought on by sky-high real estate values.) Of course, anything elevated needs something to hold it up, whether the land already is in useful service (some of the support pillars were sitting where old apts/cheap motels were 10 - 12 years ago; now, parking is a good use of such nonconstricted but interrupted space), or if the transportation authority claims easement on the ground (CTA). My larger point was that a people-mover of the Detroit type could just as easily -- and likely more smoothly -- run at L.V. Monorail speed, with little or no extra required ROW or ground space for support pillars.
With rare exception, I think YoHo's comments welcome and necessary. Unless someone wants to start a thread about what kind (if any) of RT McCarran airport should have (or is likely to have) in the near future, this will probably be my last post on this thread. Why is it that only people who rather dislike or don't care about monorails are posting? Could there be a dearth of present-day fans for the "transportation of tomorrow" nearly 50, mostly futile, years later??
Not to try to beat a dead horse, but:
OTOH, in Japan, there are a number of successful monorail operations:
I don't know what the Japanese know that we haven't figured out yet. I wish I did!
Chuck
tomikawaTT wrote: Not to try to beat a dead horse, but: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
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-based systems, though I do not know if it was horizontally-cable-hauled or direct traction. In similar manner, the "carriage" would depart and take the passengers a not-terribly-long distance (fewer than 1,000 ft. I feel sure) out to the embarkation point of their airplane. The point was, back then, according to the airport, to "separate the flow of arriving and departing flyers," which it did quite well. It also disciplined the passengers rather well, as no one had any intention of missing the aviation equivalent of the last launch-tender back to the home ship!
It was such a lovely and logical solution; I wonder if it has survived into the post 9/11 era.
BTW: I saw my first color slide of the Tokyo - to - Airport monorail in 1965. I have wondered for the past 42 years why we couldn't do something that clever here in the USA. I've never visited Japan, but I wonder still. - So clearly yes, monorails do serve well under the right circumstances. But not that hot, bumpity nuisance called the Las Vegas Monorail. - a. s.
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
http://world.nycsubway.org/us/tampa/airport.html
http://world.nycsubway.org/perl/show?13254
http://www.tampaairport.com/about/photo_gallery/index.asp click on #'s 5 and 8
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.
Patrick Boylan
Free yacht rides, 27' sailboat, zip code 19114 Delaware River, get great Delair bridge photos from the river. Send me a private message
The most prominent steam monorail I know of is the Listowel & Ballybunion (1888 to the 1920s).
if not prominent, how about early? 1876 in Philadelphia
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/centen/centen.htm
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'.
gardendance wrote: 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. ;)
Old Foreigner wrote: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.
Yet monorails never seem to catch on here in the USA, where they are basically the Esperanto of public transit.
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.
rofonda wrote: 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.
I agree. LET US LOOK AT SOME FACTS:
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.
gardendance wrote: 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'.
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'.
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.
greetings,
Marc Immeker
JT22CW wrote: Apparently (almost) everyone's notion that a monorail is a singularly modern and space-age way to move peopleHmm…how can that be when monorails actually date back to the steam era?The most prominent steam monorail I know of is the Listowel & Ballybunion (1888 to the 1920s).
I think this was called / operated on the Lartigue system. There was also a shortlived line in Portugal. Have to look it up when I'm home.
Old Foreigner wrote:The German word "scheinen" has two different meanings: a) shine and b) seem, appear. The German "ei" and "ie" are quite often mixed up by English-speaking people as they are - in German - pronounced just the other way round.
When I was teaching German, years ago, the textbook suggested as a mnemonic (memory aid) to say that "ei" had a silent "e" and were thus pronounced like an English long "I", and that words containing an "ie" defaulted to the "e." Problem is, those would be the English pronunciations "ei" = "Aye," and "ie" as in "Eek." Which is a kind of mnemonic that is harder to learn than mere rote, and might subtly leave the impression that English is more "real" a language if foreign phonemes had to be run thru English to be understandable.
Clear as mud? Fortunately, I had many music students in my course so early on I taught the kids how to speak, in German, "one egg" (ein Ei) and the well-known opera "Die (as in "Dee") Fledermaus."
Actually, the spelling of German is pretty hard-and-fast. It's grammar and syntax that drive the student crazy.
One of the biggest problem for English speakers trying to learn Germans is of course caused by the shift in pronunciation of the vowels (?). An English a sounds to continental European ears as an e instead of our ah or aah, an e as an i etc.
German grammar and syntax can even drive us Dutch crazy because there are so many exceptions and we speak a closely related language!
PS could maglev be called a monorail?
marcimmeker wrote: One of the biggest problem for English speakers trying to learn Germans is of course caused by the shift in pronunciation of the vowels (?). An English a sounds to continental European ears as an e instead of our ah or aah, an e as an i etc.German grammar and syntax can even drive us Dutch crazy because there are so many exceptions and we speak a closely related language!greetings,Marc ImmekerPS could maglev be called a monorail?
There are no diphthongs or "umlauts" (mutuated vowels) that don't also exist in French, although they are not written the same.
al-in-chgo wrote:The English "long vowels" of a, e, i, o, and u come out more like "aeee," "eeeeyah" "eye", "oh" and "yew."
marcimmeker wrote:could maglev be called a monorail?
The Transrapid, however, bears a strong resemblance to the Alweg-type monorail.
Unfortunately, what neither the German nor the Japanese maglev systems resemble is a practical, economical way to move people and their chattels over long, medium or short distances. Spending the equivalent of the cost of the Interstate Highway system on something incompatible with any other transportation mode just isn't in the realm of political reality - the public support isn't there. As for private financing, fuhgeddaboudit.
It all gets back to the question of why a monorail or why a maglev instead of a train, but at another level, one could ask why not a dedicated bus lane instead of a light-rail line?
In the case of a monorail, I believe the argument centers around some kind of elevated and guided transportation. With "duo-rail", you can elevate the tracks like the Chicago El, but you have something that is expensive, ugly, and noisy. Or you can bury the tracks and have something very compatible with the urban environment but ever so expensive. I believe the idea was that an Alweg guideway and a rubber-tire vehicle would be cheaper, better looking, and much more quiet than the Chicago El. Whether that works out that way in practice is another question and whether the Alweg has that much advantage over the El to counteract the inability to switch without this very complex, expensive Alweg counterpart to railroad frogs.
With maglev, I think that speaks to the speed-cost tradeoff. Railroads are reasonably expensive if you want to go slow. There is nothing about rails that say that you cannot go fast, but the faster you go, the higher the capital expensive (fully grade-separated lines) along with the higher the maintenance costs, both to vehicles and to guideway.
As tests in France show, there is no reason that rail cannot match maglev in speed all the way up to speeds that are impractical because the aerodynamic losses are too high. Jet planes are yet faster, but they travel at high altitudes in thinner air. The real question is what kind of maintenance expense is involved in that kind of speed, and is maglev better than rail on account of being non-contacting?
The other thing about high speed rail is that it is in the Super Power era of applying brute force engineering solutions -- the equivalent of using 20 tons of coal in a Big Boy at some uneconomical steam cutoff setting to traverse 40 miles of a big pull over a big hill. The Japanese were perhaps the first to put high-speed rail on a scientific basis by studying dynamic stability, but the approach was to build a Shinkansen or a Super Railroad where rail and wheel profiles were meticulously maintained to what was required. The British gave some serious thought to whether one could maintain dynamic stability at high speeds with worn wheels and perhaps worn truck bushings, and more scientific research along those lines could make high speed rail more afforadable.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
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