The whole set was purchased by a Texas businessman in 1966 who planned to run it from the Dallas Ft worth airport, it was being worked on in a hangar and they had erected a length of test track, they outfitted one with a turbine engine and it went over 100 mph. The project ultimately failed and it was left on the side of a road, the whole thing, cars and track
@AgentGodzillaRP1 Exactly. Texas does have a horrid history of buying the stuff that others abandoned and abused and re-applying it. I guess Ruining Something is not sending it to the dump in your world. No wonder 3 million folks have moved to Texas and thrived from all those wonderful NIMBY wasteful places like New York.
@@JOHNDANIEL1 How did Texas do in this regard? Where can I ride this wonderful monorail instead of battling I-20/183/114/635 traffic around DFW, and look from the air at your woefully inadequate DART system? I get to Texas quite a bit; I also get to NY. I wouldn't be so excited about DFW/Houston.
@@steveco360 … I too, have faint memories of riding it and of other 1964 World’s Fair attractions. I was just a kid, but I remember making that Monorail loop, and recall how slow it was…
I can't believe you didn't mention the Wuppertal suspended monorail in Germany. It's by far the oldest and most extensive suspended monorail system in the world.
This railway looks very similar to the one in Wuppertal, Germany. I was born there and rode it every day. The Wuppertal suspension railway is over 120 years old and travels much faster than 10mph
I rode that monorail while visiting the fair as a child. They seem like a wonderful mode of transportation with their inherent unobstructed ROW. The downside is the expense of building and providing access to all elevated stations and maintaining a tramway in the sky. And then there's the problem of evacuating passengers in mid-air during emergencies.
The New York World's Fair monorail was built by AMF under license from the French SAFEGE company. The test track in France can be seen in the movie "Fahrenheit 451" (1966) starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie.
Monorails are cool. Especially the rare suspended versions. But you can build a conventional elevated railway that is compatible the existing railway-supplier chain for about the same money with pretty much the same benefits. There are rare cases when they are better than conventional rail--like climbing steep slopes, as seen in Chonquin's monorail lines--but they are mostly "gadgetbahns".
One very obvious exception is the 'Schwedebahn' (literally: 'floating railway') in Wuppertal, Germany. Because of the unique conditions, of a narrow valley with steep slopes that had been largely built up, the only place to put public transport was over the river. But against that exception and success, there are many monorails that have failed.
>you can build a conventional elevated railway that is compatible the existing railway-supplier chain for about the same money No, you can't. There is a whole video for Seattle monorail shenanigans and it has some data from engineers. According to that data, the monorail is the cheapest elevated rail transport per mile.
@@user-ie4tt1xp7j The problem is the ongoing costs. There are a far more limited number of monorail manufacturers compared to rail manufacturers. Track, switches, rolling stock: everything for a monorail is a boutique item. Whereas there is far more competition in the railway space. There is also the fact that not all metro systems stay elevated. The Montreal REM uses a lot of elevated track...but also runs at grade in highway medians and through a tunnel and trenched sections.
But, only the French, and Japanese get the nod. I can at least understand the Japanese connection, given the CZcams Vids. Honestly, until this Video, I had no idea that the Frogs even had a hanging monorail.
My first monorail ride was at Disney World as a kid. I was raised in and around NYC, and remember being very impressed how smooth the ride was compared to the NYC subway system... That and how clean it was compared to the NYC subway I was used to in the 80's....
@Lawman212 they still are. Bowlero bought their bowling centers, but thecompany quibeca AMF still makes bowling center equipment. AMF invented the first commercially viable pinsetter.
Thank you, I thought I must have been getting on in my declining (Brandon Years), to have remembered that. Honestly, that was my first thought upon seeing the AMF logo.
@@rongendron8705 I was but a wee nip back in the 70s, but I'm almost sure they made Third-party replacement Parts for the Modern 1970s American Car as well. Though I wouldn't dismiss it with American Motors AMX Parts. Like I said I was like maybe 4 or 5 yo at the time. And that was back when K-Mart was still a thing. Mores the pity that it's not, a thing any longer.
Back in the 70s, we (in Dallas) had an eccentric who ran for city council every year. His big point was to build a monorail system throughout the city. It never came to fruition, and he finally died. In the eighties however, a big business park was built just northeast of downtown, and it had a small monorail system. It's still there and operative.
Las Colinas is northWEST of downtown Dallas. The Las Colinas APT is NOT a monorail. It doesn't even LOOK like a monorail. It's narrower than its guideway. It has paired sets of rubber tires that rest on TWO concrete pathways on either side of an I-beam that keeps the vehicles centered (but it doesn't support them). The closest thing DFW ever had to a monorail was the old suspended peoplemover at Love Field that connected the terminal to parking.
@@colormedubious4747 I worked out at Las Colinas for several years, and the tram had a stop at our building. It was kinda neat to ride over to the restaurants along the canal for lunch.
4:25 "Aside the fact that passengers rode a train with the tracks above it for the first time" - Wuppertal called, you are 65 years late to the party...
Disney World's monorail has traveled some 10 million miles, with a 99+% reliability rate, and carries 50 million people per year. They do work in certain situations, but with no way to do grade level crossing of a road, they're just prohibitively expensive...
Dad had some design thing to do with the World's Fair and we had season passes for both years. And, living barely 20 minutes away we'd be there a lot and I remember being in love with, "It's A Small World", Sinclair's dinosaurs and the monorail.
If only they had thought to use it to go to LaGuardia Airport down the middle of the Grand Central Parkway from what's now called "Mets Willets Pt" on the 7 train and LIRR...but they were actually using helicopters to Midtown then, and the Fair had a Heliport on the roof of Terrace On The Park.
Better to run it in the media of the GCP from the airport to the N train in Astoria. 7 train is already overcrowded, and the LIRR station is underserved.
There are four in Germany - the most famous one in Wuppertal, but also its sister in Dresden, both opened in 1901. There are also two Siemens SIPEM H-Ban suspended railways, one at the University of Dortmund, and the other at Dusseldorf Airport. Japan currently has two operational SAFEGE trains. There's also one in the US, but not operational since 2018.
Where do the Frogs keep theirs? Being German, it's kinda hard NOT to know about Wuppertal. As for Japan, well a quick search of "Schwebebahn" (Hanging Train) turns up as many Videos in Japan, as well as the one in Wuppertal. But I know nothing of this Frog One. Like where the Frogs keep it for example. Also the Disney Monorails are also of German / American design. They became "American" because shipping them over State-side from the Port of Hamburg, was both a) Too costly, and b) Too slow to get where they needed to be.
I used to go to the fair with my parents quite often as they were part of a square dance exhibiton at the federal pavilion. I never rode on the monorail, though. I've read that it was supposed to cover the entire fair site but it cost too much so it was only in one area. The fair lost a fortune and it was on again in 1965 to try to recoup it costs but that didn't happen. Robert Moses was in charge of the fair and that's what led to his removal from public life. It should be noted that the street lights of the fair that look like clusters of coloured boxes are now at the Middletown fair grounds in Middletown, New York.
The 1964-65 World's Fair was not sanctioned by Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), the official governing body. Robert Caro wrote about it in "The Power Broker". According to the story in the book, if memory serves, Robert Moses needed the fair to open for two years in order to cover the costs and make a profit, but the BIE's rules said fairs could only run for one year. Moses being Moses decided to go ahead anyway. Without the BIE's blessing, most foreign governments refused to set up their own official pavilions. Moses instead turn to other, possibly shady, promoters for the foreign pavilions. I was a kid at the time, but I remember people complaining about the prices being charged at the fair.
Apparently Spain, one of the few countries to defy the BIE’s boycott and set up a pavilion, was so outraged at the cost of trash collection that they threatened to throw their trash in the Unisphere pool at the New York World’s Fair. He’s kinda to blame for it not making money. If they had ran it for more than two seasons and if he had listened better to the developers, it could have made a profit. He never learned his lesson in 1939 and 1940. Although, I really appreciate his public works projects. Especially the parks he helped to create such as Flushing Meadows Corona Park which works really well with Citi Field and the US Open Tennis arena among other buildings such as the zoo and museum.
@@kurt9395 Ånd the traffic was horrid. I remember going with my parents once trying to get in only to be confronted by a multi-mile traffic jam. We gave up and went to see From Russia with Love.
The way they made the monorail disappear is they left it in the back seat of a car parked on the street overnight. You can make pretty much anything disappear that way in NYC. 🙃
Because like ALL WORLDS FAIRS, nothing was meant to be permanent. Seattle happened to be an exception after its fair. One could also say Cal-Expo/Sacramento County Fairgrounds monorail was also supposed to be temporary and ended up being permanent. I think all monorails, public transport, streetcar, trolly car lines never be part of history but be part of our future.
The Sydney Monorail opened in July 1988 as part of Australia's Bi-centenary, marking the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Sydney in 1788. In June 2013, developers wanted to to construct a new building in it's path without having to comply with Monorail integration as other many other new buildings had done. The government purchased the monorail and shut it down so the new development could go ahead. It took many years for the rest of the track to be removed, but some of the stations still sit abandoned. Around 70 million passenger journeys were made on the line during its lifetime.
I've always been fascinated by the World's Fair. I am only 42, so way too young to have gone, but my mother went as a young kid and remembers it well. She talked before about how cool the monorail was but didn't get to ride it. I've been to Flushing Meadows a couple times myself. Sure is a shame there is so little left of this piece of history.
@@markhellman-pn3hnOf course! When former President John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary....I have visited many places in America and the fastest place was in New York City. People talked fast, walked fast, ran fast and worked fast. This was written in 1840! 😮
Didn't hurt Disney. Unlike his inheritors he could spot German Quality. While the modern Disney Monorail is likely 100% American. That wasn't always the case, and certainly not in Walt's time.. Which is why he paid that company to leave Germany, and build all his Monorails in the US. Hell it could still be the same company for all I know.
London should have a few. Then they will have basically all modes of transport. They already have a cable car, the DLR which is in between a subway and an automated people mover with the planes that land there also (LCY), the various subwaytrains and heavy rail trains, the €urostar HSL lines, boat, bus, walking, you name it. I am planning, i hope by fall, to go to Düsseldorf to ride the suspended monorail to the University there and then go by train further to Wuppertal to ride the Schwebebahn to scratch off my bucketlist.
Hi there! Big fan of your videos. Thank you for putting your time and effort into researching and presenting all you can. I'm a resident of the Big Apple, and I live so close to Flushing Meadows but I'm dumbfounded that I didn't know this system existed. I couldn't help but notice the striking similarities to this and the Wuppertal Schwebebahn. Are the two systems related in any way apart from them both being suspended monorails? Just wanted to ask because they appear to be really identical. In conclusion, I do not wish to detract from your very well made video in any way. In fact, I'm grateful that you unearthed something that isn't as well known literally a stones away from where I live. Thank you for your intriguing videos as always! Cheers! ❤🎉🎉
I think it was back in the early 1990s when NYC was considering a crosstown suspended monorail at 34th Street. The artist's rendering showed the support columns spreading out over the street to reach the footings located on the sidewalks on both sides. Could you just imagine the typical "incidents" that occur on NYC subways from time to time, but now happening while hanging about 40 feet in the air?
We had a monorail here for the world expo in Brisbane 1988; as a kid i thought it was the best i road it dozens of times. after Expo left the monorail eventually went too.
7:15 Have you seen the Shōnan and Chiba overhead monorails in Japan? The construction teams for both obviously studied the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn, close to celebrating _125 years_ in operation. Japan has many monorails. I don't know if the cable tram that we had going from the East Side of Manhattan to Roosevelt Island has been dismantled or not, but obviously it is now obsolete, since there is now a train stop at the island and has been since the turn of the millennium.
The monorail depicted at 1:00 was stabilized by overhead guide-rails, not a gyroscope. You are confusing it with the Brennan Monorail: czcams.com/video/od4ZQFPCx5I/video.htmlsi=Ha_Orv7N9nH2MN66 .
The city didn’t win the bid for the worlds fair. It basically was an unsanctioned fair and technically not a worlds fair although it was labeled as such. Many countries boycotted and didn’t represent. The 1962 worlds fair held in Seattle was a sanctioned worlds fair With that said, your information for the most part is very accurate and well represented.
The AMF bowling alleys in the monorail stations most likely had the lanes reused and installed in other bowling alleys that were being built at the same time as when the World’s Fair ended.
Here's a curious monorail journey: One system was built in the Netherlands, installed at Spokane for a Worlds Fair in the early 1980s, then was sold off to Alton Towers (A UK theme park) where it remains in service to this day. 🇳🇱🚝🇺🇸🚝🇬🇧 Who would've thought a 10mph monorail would manage to cross the Atlantic...Not once, but *twice?* 😁
So Sacramento turns down the monorail and you say "Well, ....Hollywood passed". History may be your strong point (?) but geography certainly isn't. Sacramento ain't Hollywood......in all ways imaginable.
Indeed having lived in both Northern California and the LA area, and having spent much time at Disneyland and visiting the Cal Expo, which had a monorail and possibly still does (for which the Worlds Fair system would have been ideal, better than the system they wound up building); also there was a monorail at the LA County Fair in Pomona, near the border of LA County and Riverside, I was non-plussed. Now, Ray Bradbury wanted Los Angeles to build a high speed monorail system using either the ALWEG monorails used at Disneyland, Seattle and later built by Hitachi all over Japan, or an alternate design by Lockheed, the aircraft company, that was similiar but used a steel rail on top of the beamway rather than rubber tires (a few systems were built, including one in Fukuokua which closed in the late 90s or early 2000s), but unfortunately this was not done
Being from Sacramento, I was also confused. I think people just associate Hollywood with California, so I'm assuming that's all he was thinking when he said that. Sacramento is about 400 miles away from Hollywood.
The loop and unnatural height of the system put it firmly in the propaganda corner. The German town of Wuppertahl has been operating a system for more then 125 years. It is used by many people each day. So a VERY SUCCESFULL example exists.
I have no idea what happened to them ... but I did ride that monorail when my family visited the Worlds Fair in 1964. I was 2 years old, so I can't say too much about the experience.
Yeah, monorail is a very specific and rare case of transportation. It would not work in the USA. It would only work in Brazil, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Turkmenistan and UAE.
This is interesting. I was wondering if there are any monorails in the USA besides at Walt Disney. Apparently there are - just not a lot of them. There is one in Las Vegas now that operates along the Las Vegas Strip, connecting several hotels and casinos. There is the one in Seattle center operates between the Space Needle and the Seattle Center, but it’s a popular tourist attraction and serves no real transportation purpose. The one coming closest to this approach here is Jacksonville, Florida where an automated monorail system connecting downtown areas and moves you around Jacksonville as transportation. That seems to be about it - one real transportation system in the USA outside of Disney.
When discussing monorails in New York City the story probably should start with the Boynton Bicycle Railway in Brighton Beach in 1890. It was stabilized by an overhead rail, much like the one you showed when discussing gyroscopes (that one didn't have a gyroscope, btw).
Slight correction - NY didn't win a bid. In fact, the BIE refused to even recognize a bid for a number of reasons. So the NYWF was an "unofficial" World's Fair. (The official one was Expo 67 in Canada)
I was sold on the Disney monorail as a kid. Now I realize a bus is much more versatile for mass transit and the subsidies are pennies pasanger mile. Calizuela's "bullet train" is another boondoggle with billions spent and little chance of competition. With subsidies nearing $10 dollars per pasanger mile!
It was constructed by Warren Grafton and funded through dubious methods. His level of safety methods were questionable though he was eager to extend it westwards to start the Pacific-Atlantic Monorail If people get this reference, you have my respect!
*I believe we've identified the point of which the timeline for the fallout universe diverged from ours. Getting to the monorail without Jetpack power armor and a significant quantity of Nuka quantum can be a real challenge!*
@@cycloid2326 That'S how the US uses them. In Germany is a Monorail in the City of Wuppertal running for more than 100Years. Length: 13km (approx 7mls) Speed 60km/h (approx 45mph) - and remember no traffic jams etc. 20 Stations on the line. on average 82.000 people are transported per day (24.8Million per Year). On average you can take a train every 3 minutes. And Wuppertal is a tiny town (in a small valley) compared to NYC therefore only one line build and in use.
@@DSP16569My response was purely to the original comment saying that Manhattan should get a monorail. I know about the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, and because of its unique alignment primarily above the river Wupper, it makes more sense than a traditional elevated railway.
The whole set was purchased by a Texas businessman in 1966 who planned to run it from the Dallas Ft worth airport, it was being worked on in a hangar and they had erected a length of test track, they outfitted one with a turbine engine and it went over 100 mph. The project ultimately failed and it was left on the side of a road, the whole thing, cars and track
Thank you for the information.
@AgentGodzillaRP1 Exactly. Texas does have a horrid history of buying the stuff that others abandoned and abused and re-applying it. I guess Ruining Something is not sending it to the dump in your world. No wonder 3 million folks have moved to Texas and thrived from all those wonderful NIMBY wasteful places like New York.
@@JOHNDANIEL1 How did Texas do in this regard?
Where can I ride this wonderful monorail instead of battling I-20/183/114/635 traffic around DFW, and look from the air at your woefully inadequate DART system?
I get to Texas quite a bit; I also get to NY. I wouldn't be so excited about DFW/Houston.
I rode it at the World's Fair in 64. I was 9 and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Is it still?
@@steveco360 … I too, have faint memories of riding it and of other 1964 World’s Fair attractions. I was just a kid, but I remember making that Monorail loop, and recall how slow it was…
I got suckered by the US Royal Tire Ferris Wheel, seeing how successful they became....
You made a monorail video without the Simpsons song. Congratulations you've made it into history heaven.
Didn't Shelbyville buy this one lol
Monorail...Monorail...Monorail....
Couldn't help but chant....😂
I’m frankly disappointed. It’s a perfectly cromulent song
They didn’t need to, most of us are singing it to ourselves anyway.
Surely not using the monorail song embiggens the factuals in the video
I can't believe you didn't mention the Wuppertal suspended monorail in Germany. It's by far the oldest and most extensive suspended monorail system in the world.
You don’t mention the longest-running suspended monorail, providing public transport to Wuppertal, Germany since 1901.
This railway looks very similar to the one in Wuppertal, Germany. I was born there and rode it every day. The Wuppertal suspension railway is over 120 years old and travels much faster than 10mph
I rode that monorail while visiting the fair as a child. They seem like a wonderful mode of transportation with their inherent unobstructed ROW. The downside is the expense of building and providing access to all elevated stations and maintaining a tramway in the sky. And then there's the problem of evacuating passengers in mid-air during emergencies.
Switches are hard to do also.
“ROW”?
@@TheRealCaptainFreedom Right Of Way.
@@colormedubious4747 Okay.
pfft... Wuppertal laughs at New York ;p
The New York World's Fair monorail was built by AMF under license from the French SAFEGE company. The test track in France can be seen in the movie "Fahrenheit 451" (1966) starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie.
Interesting, this New York monorail reminded me very much at that movie.
Monorails are cool. Especially the rare suspended versions. But you can build a conventional elevated railway that is compatible the existing railway-supplier chain for about the same money with pretty much the same benefits. There are rare cases when they are better than conventional rail--like climbing steep slopes, as seen in Chonquin's monorail lines--but they are mostly "gadgetbahns".
One very obvious exception is the 'Schwedebahn' (literally: 'floating railway') in Wuppertal, Germany. Because of the unique conditions, of a narrow valley with steep slopes that had been largely built up, the only place to put public transport was over the river.
But against that exception and success, there are many monorails that have failed.
>you can build a conventional elevated railway that is compatible the existing railway-supplier chain for about the same money
No, you can't.
There is a whole video for Seattle monorail shenanigans and it has some data from engineers. According to that data, the monorail is the cheapest elevated rail transport per mile.
@@user-ie4tt1xp7j The problem is the ongoing costs. There are a far more limited number of monorail manufacturers compared to rail manufacturers. Track, switches, rolling stock: everything for a monorail is a boutique item. Whereas there is far more competition in the railway space.
There is also the fact that not all metro systems stay elevated. The Montreal REM uses a lot of elevated track...but also runs at grade in highway medians and through a tunnel and trenched sections.
Wuppertal Germany has had a suspended monorail for a century.....famous for the "Elephant Incident"....
But, only the French, and Japanese get the nod. I can at least understand the Japanese connection, given the CZcams Vids. Honestly, until this Video, I had no idea that the Frogs even had a hanging monorail.
My first monorail ride was at Disney World as a kid. I was raised in and around NYC, and remember being very impressed how smooth the ride was compared to the NYC subway system... That and how clean it was compared to the NYC subway I was used to in the 80's....
Interesting bowling alley reference. AMF was a huge bowling alley supplier.
@Lawman212 they still are. Bowlero bought their bowling centers, but thecompany quibeca AMF still makes bowling center equipment. AMF invented the first commercially viable pinsetter.
Believe it or not, my brother-in-law, worked for AMF, during the Vietnam War, making bomb shell casings!
Thank you, I thought I must have been getting on in my declining (Brandon Years), to have remembered that. Honestly, that was my first thought upon seeing the AMF logo.
@@rongendron8705 I was but a wee nip back in the 70s, but I'm almost sure they made Third-party replacement Parts for the Modern 1970s American Car as well. Though I wouldn't dismiss it with American Motors AMX Parts. Like I said I was like maybe 4 or 5 yo at the time. And that was back when K-Mart was still a thing. Mores the pity that it's not, a thing any longer.
AMF owned Harley-Davidson for a while. I think the H-D fans regard those years as the worst of times.
Back in the 70s, we (in Dallas) had an eccentric who ran for city council every year. His big point was to build a monorail system throughout the city. It never came to fruition, and he finally died. In the eighties however, a big business park was built just northeast of downtown, and it had a small monorail system. It's still there and operative.
Las Colinas is northWEST of downtown Dallas. The Las Colinas APT is NOT a monorail. It doesn't even LOOK like a monorail. It's narrower than its guideway. It has paired sets of rubber tires that rest on TWO concrete pathways on either side of an I-beam that keeps the vehicles centered (but it doesn't support them). The closest thing DFW ever had to a monorail was the old suspended peoplemover at Love Field that connected the terminal to parking.
@@colormedubious4747 Interesting. I stand corrected. Thanks
@@sifridbassoon You're very welcome. 😀
@@colormedubious4747 I worked out at Las Colinas for several years, and the tram had a stop at our building. It was kinda neat to ride over to the restaurants along the canal for lunch.
My favorite monorails are the Mark I -- Mark II and the Mark III's from Disneyland. They had great styling..........
4:25 "Aside the fact that passengers rode a train with the tracks above it for the first time" - Wuppertal called, you are 65 years late to the party...
He might have been referring to those passengers specifically. Not sure if many of those people have spent time in Germany.
Disney World's monorail has traveled some 10 million miles, with a 99+% reliability rate, and carries 50 million people per year.
They do work in certain situations, but with no way to do grade level crossing of a road, they're just prohibitively expensive...
Dad had some design thing to do with the World's Fair and we had season passes for both years. And, living barely 20 minutes away we'd be there a lot and I remember being in love with, "It's A Small World", Sinclair's dinosaurs and the monorail.
If only they had thought to use it to go to LaGuardia Airport down the middle of the Grand Central Parkway from what's now called "Mets Willets Pt" on the 7 train and LIRR...but they were actually using helicopters to Midtown then, and the Fair had a Heliport on the roof of Terrace On The Park.
Better to run it in the media of the GCP from the airport to the N train in Astoria. 7 train is already overcrowded, and the LIRR station is underserved.
Great job, Socash! Do one about LA's Pacific Electric Railway & the LARy streetcar systems someday!
Good story. My parents went to the 1964 Worlds fair. I wonder if they rode it. We lived in Queens and Buffalo.
When I think of monorails that episode on the Simpsons where they get one one comes to mind.
Thereis still an hanging monorail in Wuppertal Germany and in Japan
There are four in Germany - the most famous one in Wuppertal, but also its sister in Dresden, both opened in 1901. There are also two Siemens SIPEM H-Ban suspended railways, one at the University of Dortmund, and the other at Dusseldorf Airport. Japan currently has two operational SAFEGE trains. There's also one in the US, but not operational since 2018.
Where do the Frogs keep theirs?
Being German, it's kinda hard NOT to know about Wuppertal. As for Japan, well a quick search of "Schwebebahn" (Hanging Train) turns up as many Videos in Japan, as well as the one in Wuppertal. But I know nothing of this Frog One. Like where the Frogs keep it for example.
Also the Disney Monorails are also of German / American design. They became "American" because shipping them over State-side from the Port of Hamburg, was both a) Too costly, and b) Too slow to get where they needed to be.
You forget Wuppertal exists?
I used to go to the fair with my parents quite often as they were part of a square dance exhibiton at the federal pavilion. I never rode on the monorail, though. I've read that it was supposed to cover the entire fair site but it cost too much so it was only in one area. The fair lost a fortune and it was on again in 1965 to try to recoup it costs but that didn't happen. Robert Moses was in charge of the fair and that's what led to his removal from public life. It should be noted that the street lights of the fair that look like clusters of coloured boxes are now at the Middletown fair grounds in Middletown, New York.
The 1964-65 World's Fair was not sanctioned by Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), the official governing body. Robert Caro wrote about it in "The Power Broker". According to the story in the book, if memory serves, Robert Moses needed the fair to open for two years in order to cover the costs and make a profit, but the BIE's rules said fairs could only run for one year. Moses being Moses decided to go ahead anyway. Without the BIE's blessing, most foreign governments refused to set up their own official pavilions. Moses instead turn to other, possibly shady, promoters for the foreign pavilions. I was a kid at the time, but I remember people complaining about the prices being charged at the fair.
Apparently Spain, one of the few countries to defy the BIE’s boycott and set up a pavilion, was so outraged at the cost of trash collection that they threatened to throw their trash in the Unisphere pool at the New York World’s Fair. He’s kinda to blame for it not making money. If they had ran it for more than two seasons and if he had listened better to the developers, it could have made a profit. He never learned his lesson in 1939 and 1940. Although, I really appreciate his public works projects. Especially the parks he helped to create such as Flushing Meadows Corona Park which works really well with Citi Field and the US Open Tennis arena among other buildings such as the zoo and museum.
@@kurt9395 Ånd the traffic was horrid. I remember going with my parents once trying to get in only to be confronted by a multi-mile traffic jam. We gave up and went to see From Russia with Love.
I've read Caro's book. R. Moses was a bastard of the highest degeee. I grew up on Long Island and had to live with the crap that he built.
An AMAZING book. I was privileged to meet the author at a conference in 2008, have a pleasant conversation, and get my copy signed.
The way they made the monorail disappear is they left it in the back seat of a car parked on the street overnight. You can make pretty much anything disappear that way in NYC. 🙃
AMF was into everything back then......the beloved "Magic Triangle"
Because like ALL WORLDS FAIRS, nothing was meant to be permanent. Seattle happened to be an exception after its fair. One could also say Cal-Expo/Sacramento County Fairgrounds monorail was also supposed to be temporary and ended up being permanent. I think all monorails, public transport, streetcar, trolly car lines never be part of history but be part of our future.
And the Presidio
Always insightful. If things had gone differently, this would have been phenomenal
The Sydney Monorail opened in July 1988 as part of Australia's Bi-centenary, marking the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Sydney in 1788. In June 2013, developers wanted to to construct a new building in it's path without having to comply with Monorail integration as other many other new buildings had done. The government purchased the monorail and shut it down so the new development could go ahead. It took many years for the rest of the track to be removed, but some of the stations still sit abandoned. Around 70 million passenger journeys were made on the line during its lifetime.
I've always been fascinated by the World's Fair. I am only 42, so way too young to have gone, but my mother went as a young kid and remembers it well. She talked before about how cool the monorail was but didn't get to ride it. I've been to Flushing Meadows a couple times myself. Sure is a shame there is so little left of this piece of history.
New York has a history trying out monorails and decarding them.
it was too slow for New York
@@markhellman-pn3hnOf course! When former President John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary....I have visited many places in America and the fastest place was in New York City. People talked fast, walked fast, ran fast and worked fast. This was written in 1840! 😮
‘DISCARDING’
the mororail in germany (The Wuppertaler Schwebebahn) is awsome ... and goes faster then 10mph LOL always ask the germans for help
Didn't hurt Disney. Unlike his inheritors he could spot German Quality. While the modern Disney Monorail is likely 100% American. That wasn't always the case, and certainly not in Walt's time.. Which is why he paid that company to leave Germany, and build all his Monorails in the US. Hell it could still be the same company for all I know.
London should have a few. Then they will have basically all modes of transport. They already have a cable car, the DLR which is in between a subway and an automated people mover with the planes that land there also (LCY), the various subwaytrains and heavy rail trains, the €urostar HSL lines, boat, bus, walking, you name it.
I am planning, i hope by fall, to go to Düsseldorf to ride the suspended monorail to the University there and then go by train further to Wuppertal to ride the Schwebebahn to scratch off my bucketlist.
I had heard years ago that Ross Perot had purchased them for a possible use at a ranch in Texas.
7:38 “Is there a chance the track could bend?”
“Not on your life my Hindu friend!”
An accident?! Donuts, is there anything they cannot do? - HS
I love that episode!
The Simpsons monorail has a 1964 World's Fair poster:-)
The meadows park altogether is a jewel of the city. Many of the structures still look very futuristic
Hi there! Big fan of your videos. Thank you for putting your time and effort into researching and presenting all you can. I'm a resident of the Big Apple, and I live so close to Flushing Meadows but I'm dumbfounded that I didn't know this system existed.
I couldn't help but notice the striking similarities to this and the Wuppertal Schwebebahn. Are the two systems related in any way apart from them both being suspended monorails? Just wanted to ask because they appear to be really identical.
In conclusion, I do not wish to detract from your very well made video in any way. In fact, I'm grateful that you unearthed something that isn't as well known literally a stones away from where I live. Thank you for your intriguing videos as always!
Cheers! ❤🎉🎉
I think it was back in the early 1990s when NYC was considering a crosstown suspended monorail at 34th Street. The artist's rendering showed the support columns spreading out over the street to reach the footings located on the sidewalks on both sides. Could you just imagine the typical "incidents" that occur on NYC subways from time to time, but now happening while hanging about 40 feet in the air?
It impressive that you found the Simison’s reference
We had a monorail here for the world expo in Brisbane 1988; as a kid i thought it was the best i road it dozens of times. after Expo left the monorail eventually went too.
Very interesting, never knew this, thank u for the knowledge. this is what i like about youtube.
7:15 Have you seen the Shōnan and Chiba overhead monorails in Japan? The construction teams for both obviously studied the Wuppertaler Schwebebahn, close to celebrating _125 years_ in operation. Japan has many monorails.
I don't know if the cable tram that we had going from the East Side of Manhattan to Roosevelt Island has been dismantled or not, but obviously it is now obsolete, since there is now a train stop at the island and has been since the turn of the millennium.
There was also the Boyton Bicycle railroad in Brooklyn. This was a monorail system with a strange looking steam locomotive.
The monorail depicted at 1:00 was stabilized by overhead guide-rails, not a gyroscope. You are confusing it with the Brennan Monorail: czcams.com/video/od4ZQFPCx5I/video.htmlsi=Ha_Orv7N9nH2MN66 .
Montreal tore theirs down after six months.
I never new that New York had Monorail thats cool.
Schwebenbahn laughs in German.
I rode this as a kid each time we went to the Fair ,
The mono rail on Sentosa Island in Singapore is great, it goes around the island with stops at many interesting places.
i forgot NYC had a monorail this was probably so detailed & relaxin' yrs ago e.g. the AirTrain from JFK.
The city didn’t win the bid for the worlds fair. It basically was an unsanctioned fair and technically not a worlds fair although it was labeled as such.
Many countries boycotted and didn’t represent.
The 1962 worlds fair held in Seattle was a sanctioned worlds fair
With that said, your information for the most part is very accurate and well represented.
The AMF bowling alleys in the monorail stations most likely had the lanes reused and installed in other bowling alleys that were being built at the same time as when the World’s Fair ended.
Super cool!
Great work
We called it 'The Upside Down Train"
Sydney NSW, had a Mono rail in the 1980s. This was loving known as the Monster rail
Very interesting story. Ryan, thank you for this!
Here's a curious monorail journey: One system was built in the Netherlands, installed at Spokane for a Worlds Fair in the early 1980s, then was sold off to Alton Towers (A UK theme park) where it remains in service to this day. 🇳🇱🚝🇺🇸🚝🇬🇧
Who would've thought a 10mph monorail would manage to cross the Atlantic...Not once, but *twice?* 😁
So Sacramento turns down the monorail and you say "Well, ....Hollywood passed". History may be your strong point (?) but geography certainly isn't. Sacramento ain't Hollywood......in all ways imaginable.
@@ericr.palmer8200 most people don’t understand how big California is. Or only visit the tourist hot spots
I'm not even from the USA and even I was a little puzzled by that statement
Indeed having lived in both Northern California and the LA area, and having spent much time at Disneyland and visiting the Cal Expo, which had a monorail and possibly still does (for which the Worlds Fair system would have been ideal, better than the system they wound up building); also there was a monorail at the LA County Fair in Pomona, near the border of LA County and Riverside, I was non-plussed. Now, Ray Bradbury wanted Los Angeles to build a high speed monorail system using either the ALWEG monorails used at Disneyland, Seattle and later built by Hitachi all over Japan, or an alternate design by Lockheed, the aircraft company, that was similiar but used a steel rail on top of the beamway rather than rubber tires (a few systems were built, including one in Fukuokua which closed in the late 90s or early 2000s), but unfortunately this was not done
Being from Sacramento, I was also confused. I think people just associate Hollywood with California, so I'm assuming that's all he was thinking when he said that. Sacramento is about 400 miles away from Hollywood.
The loop and unnatural height of the system put it firmly in the propaganda corner. The German town of Wuppertahl has been operating a system for more then 125 years. It is used by many people each day. So a VERY SUCCESFULL example exists.
So cool. So sad that it is gone.
I rode that to the world's fair.
I have no idea what happened to them ... but I did ride that monorail when my family visited the Worlds Fair in 1964. I was 2 years old, so I can't say too much about the experience.
this exact same thing happened in Brockway
That looked someing similat to the monorail that existed in the LA County Fairgrounds.
I like how the seats are facing the windows
There are skytrains in several countries as of today: Germany, Japan and China
I am remembering a song that ended "... on the monorail, at the worlds fair". Can't remember where I would of heard it.
Did Marge go up against it?
Still managed to work in Murdoch approved Monorail Song, cartoons as effective scientific reference...
I like the ending on this one Ryan...It might not quite be over yet!
Yeah, monorail is a very specific and rare case of transportation. It would not work in the USA. It would only work in Brazil, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Turkmenistan and UAE.
Making an EL sexy and more complex for no good reason
At least the monorail from the Seatle Worlds Fair ran far after the fair closed.
Thanks Professor....
🎶🎵🎶
Monorail.
Monorail.
Monorail.
I hear those things are awfully loud.
Minor point. The Bronx monorail ran from the Bartow station to City Island...not Barrow. Good vid !
This is interesting. I was wondering if there are any monorails in the USA besides at Walt Disney. Apparently there are - just not a lot of them. There is one in Las Vegas now that operates along the Las Vegas Strip, connecting several hotels and casinos. There is the one in Seattle center operates between the Space Needle and the Seattle Center, but it’s a popular tourist attraction and serves no real transportation purpose. The one coming closest to this approach here is Jacksonville, Florida where an automated monorail system connecting downtown areas and moves you around Jacksonville as transportation. That seems to be about it - one real transportation system in the USA outside of Disney.
Disneyland uses it as a novelty - thats all its good for
When discussing monorails in New York City the story probably should start with the Boynton Bicycle Railway in Brighton Beach in 1890. It was stabilized by an overhead rail, much like the one you showed when discussing gyroscopes (that one didn't have a gyroscope, btw).
New York, Brockway, Ogdenville, North Haverbrook.
Chongqing, China has the largest and most successful monorail network in the world. It's quite a sight to behold. My wife rides it every day.
I rode it at a 9 year old. It was great.
Slight correction - NY didn't win a bid. In fact, the BIE refused to even recognize a bid for a number of reasons. So the NYWF was an "unofficial" World's Fair. (The official one was Expo 67 in Canada)
monorails are the answer to our transit problems!
Staten Island should have a monorail
I was sold on the Disney monorail as a kid. Now I realize a bus is much more versatile for mass transit and the subsidies are pennies pasanger mile. Calizuela's "bullet train" is another boondoggle with billions spent and little chance of competition. With subsidies nearing $10 dollars per pasanger mile!
L,a. County had a monorail with hanging trains
It was constructed by Warren Grafton and funded through dubious methods. His level of safety methods were questionable though he was eager to extend it westwards to start the Pacific-Atlantic Monorail
If people get this reference, you have my respect!
*I believe we've identified the point of which the timeline for the fallout universe diverged from ours. Getting to the monorail without Jetpack power armor and a significant quantity of Nuka quantum can be a real challenge!*
Manhattan is like the perfect place for a monorail.
what about the EXISTING subway system ?? ...ooopppsss ... i forgot about THAT
A low capacity gadget-bahn is just about the last thing one of the densest areas in the world needs
@@cycloid2326 That'S how the US uses them. In Germany is a Monorail in the City of Wuppertal running for more than 100Years.
Length: 13km (approx 7mls)
Speed 60km/h (approx 45mph) - and remember no traffic jams etc.
20 Stations on the line.
on average 82.000 people are transported per day (24.8Million per Year).
On average you can take a train every 3 minutes.
And Wuppertal is a tiny town (in a small valley) compared to NYC therefore only one line build and in use.
@@DSP16569My response was purely to the original comment saying that Manhattan should get a monorail. I know about the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, and because of its unique alignment primarily above the river Wupper, it makes more sense than a traditional elevated railway.
Disneyland has had a monorail since the day it opened. Nothing new.
Was there anything with the letters AMF on it that wasn't a failure?
Mono=One
Rail=Rail
those cars would make for great, repurposed, hanging tiny homes.
They should have connected it to LaGuardia at the time of the fair.
Montreal's REM is open from downtown to Brossard. Its expanding to West island and rhe airport.
Réseau express métropolitain
For the first time? Nope. Check out Wuppertal Germany.Going strong since 1901.