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Light Rail Vehicles - LRT, ICTS, Monorail, and more
(12-15-2016, 10:00 AM)Canard Wrote: No, I've only touched the edge of Germany (Rust). Sad the accident at Emsland means a ride on the Transrapid is now out of the question. Sad But yes am quite familiar with the Schwebebahn! Another excellent video by my friend Luke:

That is really cool....  We would never be that brave here to try something different though....
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That looks exactly like the implementation Brampton wants for their LRT. They want to avoid going anywhere near their downtown, so they want to route it through a naturalized creek.
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Wasn't suggesting Wuppertal for RoW; but the Siemens systems I mentioned on the previous page would have been great.
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I was lucky enough two weeks ago to have work ship me to Hawaiʻi for a week's conference-sort-of-thing. We were at the Hilton Waikoloa Village Resort and they had one of these:

   

Casual searching comes up with very little information other than "Swiss-made".

So: what are they? And was the fact that walking was often faster the fault of their system (pdf), their rotational switches, their operators, or the trams themselves?
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It's a custom thing made by Schwager Davis. It used to be a Von Roll monorail from what I recall and then SD did a big overhaul on it. Similar system runs in Indianapolis at the Clarion Health Sciences centre.
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Yeah; more here:

http://www.schwagerdavis.com/projectsnews/

http://www.schwagerdavis.com/project/haw...enovation/

As far as speed goes: you can thank the fact that it runs on sidewalks for that. See why I've got such a hard-on for putting these types of things up in the air? Wink
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"runs on sidewalks" FWIW, it runs on a dedicated transitway that has at-grade pedestrian crossings. (If this is what you said, but more succinctly, then that's my bad.) I was disappointed that in the stretches between crossings they didn't kick it up a bit, but that seemed to also be where they put the ever-so-slowly-turning switches.

Ah well, there's a reason the staff call it the Hilton Walkalot Village.
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Haha! I'm intrigued by your visit - Hawaii is on our list of places to visit, and I wanted to stay at that resort just to check out that system. Wink
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(12-15-2016, 01:12 PM)Canard Wrote: Wasn't suggesting Wuppertal for RoW; but the Siemens systems I mentioned on the previous page would have been great.

Wuppertal is awesome. If I ever go anywhere near I’ll have to make a point of taking it. One thing I find interesting about it is that the bottom of vehicles I think are just smooth — how many other vehicles are like that? Maybe not any — not even aircraft!
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It's appropriate we're discussing Wuppertal - since on Sunday, they put into service the first 5 of their brand-new trains:

http://www.railjournal.com/index.php/eur...hannel=537

[Image: aussenansicht-vorne-buero_staubach-653x408.jpg]

Stadler is building 31 new trains for them.

It's pretty cool seeing such futuristic new vehicles on 100+ year old infra. I hate the term - but it's maybe a little "steampunk", even. Smile
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What's the downside of this "upside-down monorail" as compared to the usual monorail? The rail is obviously higher but that also makes it less visually obtrusive in my eyes.
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Wuppertal's structure is massive and is a result of the technology available at the time.

The Siemens systems in Dortmund and Düsseldorf (see previous page) are much more elegant structure-wise.

It's 6-of-one... I like straddle beam monorails more but I couldn't tell you why. Personal preference. The guideway is a little less obtrusive if the train sits on top since the supports don't have to "reach over".
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A nice little video about the first day of service with the new trains:



It's kind of crazy to watch that, and then compare that to this:

[Image: schwebebahn128~_v-gseapremiumxl.jpg]

...knowing it's the same system?!
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Yes! You get the same feeling from a lot of the older Tokyo railway bridges (Yamanote sen!) that were built more than 100 years ago.
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London has some of that, too! I remember getting off at Baker Street, stepping out of a shiny new train into a station that is older than Canada!

A lot of the Docklands Light Railway stuff is built onto hundred year old stone structures, too - so you have this cool automated train running across stone bridges and stuff.

I am all about new and brutalist (Westminster is heaven!), but I was pretty smitten with that - the whole Underground, overall. That constant tug between old and new.
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