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1 Dead in Disney World Monorail Crash

Its on the BBC news site as well, but Fox has a picture of the damage.

CF13News has a bit more information. Aparently it does had a track detection system, so its not clear yet how this crash happened.

Interesting - I've never been to Disneyworld, but my first thought was that no monorail could surely go fast enough to cause an impact fatality - but the second source there says the top speed was 40mph, so maybe it could.

Seems very suprising, that a Disney Monorail would crash.

OT: Is that a Nova LFS bus in the background on the Fox picture? I would be MAD if I had to ride that instead of the monorail- I can ride Novabuses in Chicago!

Walt Disney was a visionary. Those monorails have been moving 50 million passengers a year around Disney World since it opened, safely and reliably. Why they never got built elsewhere is a mystery to me. **coughGMcough**

EDIT: Okay, It appears that retired Mark IV monorail trains from Disney World ended up at the Ballys-MGM monorail in Las Vegas, NV, "becoming the inspiration and nucleus for today's Las Vegas Monorail."

http://www.alweg.com/disneyalweg.html

Lol, surely monorail is in reality much too inflexible to create a proper network with?

A LOT more information and pictures in this artical

Looks like the crash happended when one train reversed down the wrong line, into an oncoming train. All down to a switch failling to operate, and the driver carrying on.

Kevo00 wrote:Lol, surely monorail is in reality much too inflexible to create a proper network with?

Well Malaysia seem be trying to position themselves as the world leader in Monorails. Certainly they seem to be quite popular in the country at the moment, with the KL Monorail built and operational, and the Penang Monorail under construction. An Indian City (cant remember if its Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata) has just granted a Malaysian company the contract to build their line.

But I agree - single line working is fine for monorails but when lines spur and branch, they're not as flexible.

Yep, at the end of day you can't beat good old steel wheel on steel rail.

Why? The track switches are (I imagine) a bit more complicated, but there is a lot less to go wrong with a monorail beam than conventional rail track. Bit hard to derail, also.

JamieLei wrote:

Kevo00 wrote:Lol, surely monorail is in reality much too inflexible to create a proper network with?

Well Malaysia seem be trying to position themselves as the world leader in Monorails. Certainly they seem to be quite popular in the country at the moment, with the KL Monorail built and operational, and the Penang Monorail under construction. An Indian City (cant remember if its Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata) has just granted a Malaysian company the contract to build their line.

But I agree - single line working is fine for monorails but when lines spur and branch, they're not as flexible.

Monorail switches (or as we call them points) are just two different pieces of track, either straight or curve which can be slid in and out, not that hard to fathom!

they found out that the back up system the 2-4 people at the station that are at a control pad where they can hit a emergency stop for the monorail, had left a repairman in charge as they went across the street to eat at denny's.

Sure but the switches/points take up quite a lot of land compared to normal railway switches...and you very rarely see switches on any monorail system - why is that?

You probably see them rarely because there is no real need for them. Most monorails run in a loop which is easier to achieve than standard rail because there is only one rail. In this case switches are only used to access depot areas.

This example, in Kuala Lumpur, appears to adopt the transrapid approach of flexible track:


The Wuppertal Schwebebahn however adopts the replacing track segment idea which doesn't really take up all that much room.