Light Rail Vehicles - LRT, ICTS, Monorail, and more

[Rainrider22]

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. 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....

[Viewfromthe42]

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.

[Canard]

Wasn't suggesting Wuppertal for RoW; but the Siemens systems I mentioned on the previous page would have been great.

[chutten]

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?

[Canard]

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.

[Canard]

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?

[chutten]

"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.

[Canard]

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.

[ijmorlan]

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!

[Canard]

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



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.

[tomh009]

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.

[Canard]

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".

[Canard]

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:



...knowing it's the same system?!

[tomh009]

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.

[Canard]

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.