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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 35: Monorails
Can you recall the sheer excitement of seeing a monorail glide by at Disney World or the thrill of building your own transit empire in games like Roller Coaster Tycoon? We certainly can, and in this episode of Transit Tangents, we tap into that childhood wonder to explore the captivating world of monorails. From differentiating between maglevs, straddle-beam, and saddlebag systems to sharing personal stories of how these unique transit systems captured our imaginations, we offer a history of monorail systems in the US and explore why this transit of the future went off the rails... well, rail.
Doors are closing. Public transit, that's my way to roll On. A metro, I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind, daily grind. Public transit, it's the rhythm of my life. Oh yeah, at one time, this technology was seen as the transit solution of the future. While it is still utilized more successfully in other parts of the world, in the US it's mostly relegated to amusement parks and airports. On this episode, we dive into monorails their history as well as their future, coming up on Transit Tangents. Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we are talking about the form of transit that you probably see everywhere where you live Not actually but that you maybe have seen at an amusement park or if you've traveled outside of the country. Today we are talking all about the monorail. The monorail.
Speaker 2:Yeah, who wasn't like fascinated as a kid about the idea of like the Disney monorail, totally? I used to when my grandparents they took to disney world and I was like six and we had this um video that they send.
Speaker 2:They would send out like so you would say you would contact disney, like I want to do a vacation, and they would send out this vacation package for playing with the vhs tape and I watched that vhs tape over and over and over again as a kid and one of the parts that stands out to me most was the fact that it had the monorail in the video and it showed it a lot, wow, and I was just like so fascinated by the monorail at Disney.
Speaker 1:Wow, I never had a VHS tape but similar theme. I used to be a big roller coaster tycoon nerd and I used to build monorails and I would actually make it like public transit throughout my amusement park and roller coaster I also did that, yeah, and you could.
Speaker 2:You could bury them underground too and make like loop stations around the park. I don't know if I ever did that.
Speaker 1:That's pretty good it was very it was very innovative in the roller coaster tycoon sphere yes, yeah, yeah, and of course, we see them in city skylines, but not in city skylines too, yet, but that's a conversation for a whole other day. Um, let's start off, though, as we typically do with these sorts of episodes, and kind of dive into the history of monorails, which is fairly fascinating. Uh, we've just been kind of like prepping for this uh conversation, and there are some amazing images that you're going to be able to see if you're, if you're watching this, if you're listening.
Speaker 2:We will do our best to describe them for you and if you haven't, if you're, if you're watching this and you're not like a huge uh transportation nerd for whatever reason welcome.
Speaker 2:I don't know why you found us welcome but also just to give a kind of description of what we mean by monorail. We do truly mean there is one rail and a vehicle is driving across it. Now, there are different types of monorails out there. You know, you have maglevs, which, questionably, are kind of monorail ish, but we're talking about things that have physical wheels, whether they are, you know, the metal cast wheels, rubber wheels or whatever and they're running along some type of central rail and that can be vehicles that straddle, so things that hang from the rail, or it can be things that we call a saddlebag which sits on top of the rail. So let's kind of give a little overview of exactly what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:So to dive into some of the history here, the first kind of monorails that we're going to talk about they go back to the early 19th century. But the first notable one, I guess, is the Henry Palmer model that happened in the UK in 1821, which, wildly, was a monorail that was pulled by a horse, which, when we think of monorails today it's this futuristic thing. So to think of it being pulled by a horse is pretty wild.
Speaker 2:But at the time it kind of was futuristic, even though it was horse-powered.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this one actually was suspended. So this monorail was hanging from a rail, essentially being pulled by a horse, and it was mostly being used to carry freight. So this one wasn't necessarily a passenger monorail but was meant to be carrying goods back and forth.
Speaker 2:yeah, but this really kind of like laid the groundwork for where monorails would go in the future yeah, and you can get into a rabbit hole of monorail designs, like there's a lot of black and white pictures of all types of goofy trains. There's the. There's like a gyro monorail which looks a full train but it just runs along a track on the ground that it like bends and everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks like it's impossible also, it does look like it's impossible.
Speaker 2:But the Palmer monorail inspired future designs.
Speaker 1:One of those is the monorail in Wuppertal, which is pronounced the Schwebebahn Schwebebahn, sorry, schwebe, I can't even say uh the monorail in vupertal, which is pronounced uh the schwebebon schwebe, sorry, schwebe the duolingo is paying off. I've been doing german duolingo and chris looked at the word and was just like I don't know how to say that and I was like I think I got it and I had it pretty close actually, and then I just botched it when it came time to actually do it.
Speaker 2:But we're there but I've had I've had the absolute honor and privilege of being able to ride that particular system. We talked about it way back in the beginning of the podcast.
Speaker 1:It was episode one.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't recommend you go listen to it because it's probably not probably terrible, we've gotten better at this, I think, but but I was, uh, I was able to ride this, uh, this monorail in bupatal, and a good friend of mine actually just rode it as well. He's super excited about it, but it's this beautiful sleek monorail train that is suspended from these tracks that follow this gorgeous river through a valley. It's absolutely incredible. If you ever end up outside of Cologne, germany, definitely go and check this out, especially if you're a transit nerd. But this was a super modern version of public transit for the late 1800s and it was inspired by this old horse john version and it's amazing that it still operates today too and it looks they've actually done a good job, like the stations looked fairly modern and very like it's actually a functional transit.
Speaker 1:They've done a lot of updates too.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, of course, um, but it's pretty amazing that it's still running and there's a couple of train other, uh, monorail systems that were inspired by this one, but that was like the first real, super public, super heavily used monorail system.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And then we kind of move forward into the 1900s. The technology was continuing to evolve and we got the kind of next major one we're going to talk about today, which is the Boynton Bicycle Railroad, which is a fun name, um, and it's uh, it's called a bicycle railroad because it is just again kind of up on two wheels, like a bicycle would be. It's not kind of like a train where you've got, you know, obviously it's more than four wheels on a train, but where you have wheels in each of the corners, you just have wheels in the center, which is again kind of interesting to think about, and everyone pedaled yeah, that would be way cooler, but not everybody pedaled.
Speaker 2:Um, it is a wild looking one and we'll throw up some photos of it, but it was basically like if you took a train and you just put one wheel on the bottom of the entire train, uh, and then ran that like it's like it looks like a steam locomotive on a single rail. Um, and this one ran in Long Island, new York. It was a little bit more of a touristy attraction. The cars were two stories and they could fit up to 70 passengers on them, and was there a top?
Speaker 1:rail to this one too. Yes.
Speaker 2:So it kind of looked like you took a double track system and just flipped it on its side, so you had the main rail on the bottom that the train ran on, and then you had a rail at the top that was just a guide rail to kind of make sure that it didn't yeah make sure it didn't like really sway off the track or anything, um, but it only ran for about two years before they shut it down gotcha, and this was in long island, new york.
Speaker 1:Just for for clarity here, um, and yeah, I mean ran for two years and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we saw much like this exact design afterwards there's only one other one that was somewhat similar, that came a little bit after this, and that was the pelham park and city island railway.
Speaker 2:Okay, and this was also a monorail design. It was mostly, uh, just a ground track and I think in some places they had a guide rail on the top. That one also ran, I think, for about two years, uh, and the car on its it was also horse gentleman at first started. Okay, they decided to electrified as the it's like the first electrified monorail, and on its inaugural ride it fell off the track it's really first day they electrified it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really inspiring for people who are looking at this is like this is the future right.
Speaker 1:Um, well, and unfortunately I think we're gonna have another, uh first day mishap and we talk about our next one here. So, uh, I mean, you've got some of the the better history on this while you explain it. But, uh, the monorail that most people are probably familiar with when you think monorail is very likely the disney monorail yeah, um you interesting history, though, from back in the 50s, when Walt Disney kind of got interested in monorails initially.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not a lot of progress is really made in the US on monorails until Disneyland, which is wild to think about. That it's the amusement park that really set this off, but Disney, when he was drawing up the concept of Disneyland, when we got to Tomorrowland, he wanted a futuristic mode of transportation to get people around the park. He traveled all over the world with his wife. One of their destinations was Cologne, Germany, where they stumbled across this test track of a monorail system. It was basically just in its initial operation and this test track was run by the Alveg company, if I'm saying that correctly, A-L-W-E-G.
Speaker 1:I think you got it. Yeah, w's are like V's, that's what I know.
Speaker 2:So they came across this. They were so impressed by the design of it.
Speaker 2:He rushed to the engineering office, didn't speak any German was able to convince them to give him some of the plans and photos of the test track. And he took that back to his engineering team in Anaheim and basically told them hey, get started on this. And they didn't know where, really where, to begin. They took a blank sheet of paper and they drew out what they, what they envisioned, and then had to set about this whole journey of figuring out how to put it together.
Speaker 1:Right and you were saying to like obviously you know there were not monorails in in that area during that era in the U S, so they were literally like scrounging for parts that like junkyards and stuff, trying to pull pieces together to be able to make this happen. And they actually had to bring out the the all of the company to come and help at a certain point to make this actually happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, engineers were going to junkyards in California and pulling old electrical components and cable system components from the old trolley systems in San Francisco. So it's funny, there's like a combination of like hot rod parts and electrical components from old trolleys that really went into making the Disney monorail and that was by this legendary engineer, robert Gurr, who is really famous in the Disney world for designing a lot of rides and attractions. But they scrambled to get this together and it was two weeks before the park opened that they had the whole thing ready to go and to be tested and they turned it on and it went an eighth of an inch before all of the drivetrains burned up. The people who assembled it put a lot of the components in backwards.
Speaker 1:And so it just didn't work. That'll do it. Putting them in backwards, that'll do it. Anyway, they basically so that was two weeks before the park was meant to open. They scrambled for two weeks to essentially put this thing back together the correct way, putting the parts in forwards, not backwards. Um, and the night before the actual opening of this, uh, they were able to run one full test of it and they got it to work. Uh, and the next day, president nixon was actually there to come for the grand opening. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the second time that they ran this monorail ever, the president was there to see it happen or even to ride it.
Speaker 2:He was on it. He was on it. Yeah, president Nixon was on it for its second run. You have to imagine they were so nervous.
Speaker 1:We're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out, please share this with your friends and if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there.
Speaker 2:Just be sure to leave us a rating and give us a comment.
Speaker 2:Disney's vision of this was that they were gonna show this off and it was gonna be this revolutionary style of transit that would really take off across the country. He invited leaders from all over the US to come in and view the monorail, but they just weren't that interested. And the Alvig Company Alvig Alvig Company, thank you but they just weren't that interested. And the AllVig company actually set up a showroom in Los Angeles to try to convince US markets to adopt this type of technology, but it just didn't really take off. It kind of seemed like monorails were going to be destined for just amusement park spaces until we get to some of the World's fairs in the 60s and a world's fair. I wish we still had the like grand world's fairs that we used to have in the past, but the world's fairs are always a showcase of technology of tomorrow and there were a couple of notable world fairs that looked at the monorail as a good way to attract visitors to their events and they adopted it I also do wish we still had these World's Fairs.
Speaker 1:I believe Seattle, in particular the Seattle Space Needle, which sticks out in their skyline, obviously was built for the World's Fair. It'd be fun to have fun-looking buildings like that all over the place. But Seattle did build a monorail for their World's Fair. It's 1.2 miles long. It connects the Seattle Center with downtown Seattle, and that's one that actually continues to operate, serving mostly tourists, I'd imagine, but probably some commuters as well, if you live in the exact correct places to be able to get back.
Speaker 2:If you live in the right place, sure, it can be useful as a commuter, but for the most part it's tourist. I've ridden it once I think it was my first trip to Seattle and we took it from the sort of space-signal area back towards the convention center, and this system is one that people in Seattle have talked about for a really long time about expanding, and it just never really gains the traction Right.
Speaker 1:And Seattle is expanding other transit networks. That would be an interesting city for us to talk about at some point. You were actually just there fairly recently, but yeah, I mean we'll see. Another kind of city where we've seen this, which we've just recently had an episode about, is San Antonio. If, which we've just recently had an episode about, is san antonio. Um, if you haven't seen that episode, we'll make sure that there's a card you can click on here or you can watch right afterwards. Uh, if you're on youtube or if you're on spotify or apple or wherever you can go, scroll back and look for the san antonio episode. Um, but uh, they also built a monorail for their, uh, hemisphere 1968 yeah, I like the name of it.
Speaker 1:Yes they also have a building that looks just like the Space Needle, basically.
Speaker 2:They built the. It's the Pan America Tower. You can go to the top and it's actually really cool.
Speaker 1:There's a restaurant.
Speaker 2:It's very neat. You can see forever from the top. It's so cool and it's such a striking part of the skyline in San Antonio.
Speaker 1:Yes, the unfortunate reality about the San Antonio monorail, though, was that number one.
Speaker 2:it no longer exists, uh, and at one point it actually crashed, killing somebody, which is it did, unfortunately not great no, um, there was a defect, I think, in the track and one of the one of the cars bumped off and, like an accordion, it just pulled all the other carts, oh so, not great?
Speaker 1:no, definitely not. Um, uh, beyond that, though, in the us, uh, most of the time you see a monorail outside of an amusement park, it's going to be at like an airport. There's a lot of interesting like people movery type things. Is the detroit one even? Uh, that way I don't think so yeah, systems like that though, where it's generally short distances um for whatever reason again, airports is like a pretty common use case for them, but I think the future of monorails really gravitated towards these autonomous people movers.
Speaker 2:So they're going to be much smaller, like one, two cars that fit a very limited number of people. Like you said, airport use cases, amusement parks or resorts, that kind of thing. There was a use case in California in Mammoth Mountain, which is my absolute favorite ski mountain, but they were introducing sort of innovative transportation solutions and they decided to introduce this automated people mover and it was like these two sort of toaster shaped cars if you can imagine what a toaster shape is but it's like these two toaster shaped cars and they're autonomous and they would convey people to one of the lifts. Unfortunately, it went through the end barrier of the rail at one point and ended up injuring two uh park guests. Uh, the some of the some of the lifties then started calling it instead of the people mover. They started calling it the people remover yeah, so yeah, it went away.
Speaker 2:You lost the pr battle at that point yeah, yeah, it didn't last very long and by the 2000s it was gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah so outside of these couple special use cases where you're a people mover at an airport, at a resort, at an amusement park, monorails never really took off as any sort of real whatever buses in the United States. So there were higher construction costs involved because you didn't have all the parts, the people who knew how to work on them, the engineering firms, all that sort of stuff. You also had integration complexities.
Speaker 2:I don't think city engineers really know how to integrate it into the rest of the transportation network. I think that's a challenge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's generally going to be running above ground in most cases. If you have an underground system, it's actually pretty difficult to transfer.
Speaker 2:It requires a lot of walking to transfer between them.
Speaker 1:And if you already kind of have the ground level or underground level infrastructure, kind of interesting to try to make those moves happen. But yeah, definitely a tricky balance to figure out where to put that. You also have capacity limitations in comparison to heavy rail or light rail in particular. In some cases you can fit less people on them in general. So you know those kind of limitations collectively, along with a whole bunch of other. You know variables city by city kind of made it so that monorails were not the favorable choice for American cities as they were building out their transit networks.
Speaker 2:But moving into the 2000s there's been a renewed interest in monorails in the US and kind of across the world. One of the reasons for that is that technology has advanced so it's a lot easier to automate these systems. With the technology advancement comes cheaper materials as well, so they're a little cheaper to build and maintain. We have sort of overcome a lot of the challenges of how to sort of integrate it into the systems. We have better, you know, escalator networks or there's better ways to connect people from the, you know, above the street mode of transit to the below the street. You know we can kind of get around those things in a little easier fashion now.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and you know, for folks who pay attention to this sort of thing, uh, or travel, the one place in the U? S that you maybe have actually seen a monorail for real public transit uh, that's actually fairly new is in Las Vegas. So, uh, las Vegas actually built their monorail in 2004. Fairly new about 20 years ago. Yeah, vegas actually built their monorail in 2004 fairly new about 20 years ago. Yeah, wow, geez, yeah. In 2004, though, uh and uh, it primarily serves the Vegas Strip, essentially connecting some of the casinos.
Speaker 1:It runs behind Las Vegas Boulevard, so if you're not looking for it, you maybe haven't seen it you know, I've actually not ridden it and I've been to Vegas a couple times and I think I've only seen it one of the times I was there. I was not, like I've every anytime I've been in Vegas, usually been kind of quick in and out.
Speaker 2:I think I took it from the Luxor to the MGM one of the times I was in Vegas several times ago and it was actually.
Speaker 1:I thought it was really cool and I wanted to connect every casino because I think that'd be awesome right and that's part of the limitation right now with Vegas's system and it's I mean, it's struggled financially and, I think, with ridership in a lot of cases but it's because it basically just connects some of the casinos on the strip and that's it. It does not make it all the way to downtown las vegas, where you've got kind of the I forget what they call that area but near some of the fremont street.
Speaker 1:Fremont street and, like, you've got the big covered part of downtown there. That's a, that's a kind of happening spot as well. There's also, uh, connects to like areas. You know it, it doesn't connect that part of the city to the strip, um, and it also falls just short of the airport as well. Um, if you were to extend that line, it would make a whole lot of sense. You can get to the airport fairly easily.
Speaker 1:Um, I think another thing that should be looked at with this is, uh, with the expansion of bright line west. That's being actually built right now is what's being talked about, but they've already started work on bright line west connecting, uh, los angeles to las vegas. Um, the bright line west stop is currently just short of the strip, um, kind of in a similar distance away as the airport is, which is a miss, in my opinion. They should try to obviously connect it all the way, but if you're not going to connect it all the way, having this monorail connect down to the new bright line station as well would make a whole lot of sense. Like I could envision seeing a situation where you have one line branch out to the airport, another line branch down to the bright line station, and if you were to do that, this would very likely be an extremely successful system and would make that trip from LA to Las Vegas that much more doable, not needing to worry about a car on the Vegas side of the situation.
Speaker 2:Although the Tesla tunnel is going to overtake it, so it might Actually we should do an episode about that.
Speaker 1:We will, we're talking about putting a whole bunch of the like I don't even know what they call that system again. Oh, is that the PRT? Basically, it's basically a PRT. Oh yeah, personal Rapid Transit yeah they're talking about an extensive tunnel network throughout Vegas. There's obviously one tunnel. Right now there's one, but we'll see Conversation for another episode, episode um, but the monorail in vegas is.
Speaker 2:It's a good system for what it is it's really to transport tourists to and from certain casinos. Uh, it runs for just under four miles, so, which is notable for this type of system, um, and it does help alleviate congestion on the las vegas strip, because it's that many more people who aren't going to be calling a taxi to take them to the other end of the strip, right, um, but all in all, it is mostly a tourist attraction, totally, and in a sense it is still an amusement park because it's vegas yeah, that's fair, but it could be a real system could be a real thing to be yeah so monorails in the us kind of flopped.
Speaker 2:We're seeing a little bit of advancement, but there's not a lot of talk about new monorail systems. Uh, they, they present, uh, quite a few challenges. Yeah, um. However, outside of the us, monorails have they present quite a few challenges. However, outside of the US, monorails have taken off in some markets. The most notable would definitely be Japan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I had no idea about this for the most part, that monorails were actually used for real transit in any case, with the exception of the little Las Vegas section. Yeah, I did not know this. So so japan saw their first use of a monorail, uh, in 1957, which is a very similar use case to what the early ones in the united states were. Uh, it was in the probably butchering the name here uno zoo um in tokyo, um, and it was basically an attraction for zoo visitors.
Speaker 2:It was able to take people to the zoo, I think so again kind of a use case for amusement, but it inspired people in Japan to look at this as a viable transportation solution and they sort of latched onto it Totally Outside of the zoo. We go into the 1960s, and this is when this economic boom in Japan and this huge rapid urbanization that was happening the government was looking for better ways to get people from suburbs back into the city and to move people around these now incredibly urban environments, and that led them to looking at monorails, and one of the first real urban monorails in the world in this part of the world for sure happened in 1964. And this was the monorail that connected to the airport at the time, and they used that as sort of a showcase to say, okay, we can use this to get you to the airport, we can use this to get you pretty much anywhere else too totally, and this kind of spurred other cities in japan to look at this as a real transit use case.
Speaker 1:in the 80s and 90s we saw other japanese cities start to actually use monor as a real transit use case. In the 80s and 90s we saw other Japanese cities start to actually use monorails for real transit solutions. 1985 saw one. In 1990, we saw Osaka install one and theirs became the longest one of the longest in the world at over 28 kilometers long, and was like a real part of their transit system.
Speaker 2:That puts our four miles in Las Vegas to shame? Yes, it does. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Moving forward. Throughout the 90s, though, tokyo added more lines to their monorail network and they also began building fully automated lines, which is huge, especially in the United States. So many of our transit systems are actually having a hard time staffing and whatnot and it doesn't mean that there's nobody riding it necessarily, but to have automated systems makes things so much easier as far as having reliable service and having things run on time, but also requiring less staff, which can be tricky to actually staff up your transit networks appropriately.
Speaker 2:As we move into the future. Japan is actually sort of exporting this technology to other places. There are cities in the US that are looking at the Japanese model. There are cities in Malaysia and Brazil as well that are looking at the systems that Japan has, for the most part, perfected and looking at how they can use that monorail technology in their cities as we move towards a greener, cleaner future.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. With all that being said, if you've ridden any of these monorails before that we've mentioned, or if we missed anything, definitely let us know in the comments below. We love reading the comments. We try to respond to as many as we can.
Speaker 2:Do you think they belong suspended above your streets, or do they just belong within amusement parks?
Speaker 1:And would you rather the United States learn from Japan as far as monorails go, or would you rather us borrow their technology in high-speed rail, because I think I'd rather see some more high-speed rail.
Speaker 2:I'm going to go for gondolas before that.
Speaker 1:You're going for gondolas first, all right, Pete Buttigieg, if you're listening.
Speaker 2:If you want to give us your opinion on monorails, please go jump into the comments.
Speaker 1:With all that being said, thank you so much for watching watching, we really appreciate it. And enjoy the rest of your transit tangents Tuesday.