Railways Blog

War Liberal muses about an article in Slate on Monorails. (Most of the musings are in the comments section)

Old-fashioned science fiction cities always seem to be full of monorails; a generation or two ago they were seen as the mass transit of the future. As a child watching Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, I was enthralled by the vision of aerial monorails replacing the London Tube, and cities linked by high-speed intercity monorails. ‘Serious’ transport publications presented a similar vision. Two rails was the past, one rail was the future!

Of course this brave new world never came to pass. For inter-city travel we now see such wonders as the French TGV, sleeker and more futuristic than anything imagined by Gerry Anderson, but running on the same flanged wheels on steel rail as used a century and a half earlier by George Stephenson. For urban travel we’ve seen the remarkable revival of a form of transport though obsolete three decades before, the tram. Just about the only monorails in Britain to carry passengers are amusement park rides at places like the Beaulieu Motor Museum and Blackpool Pleasure Beach

Monorails have a long history. Right back in 1878 the world saw the not terribly successful and much-ridiculed steam-powered Listowel and Ballybunion Railway in Ireland. 1902 saw the rather more successful Schwebebahn in Wuppertal, Germany, still running today.

The Slate article thinks monorails are a better idea than light rail.

Light-rail options are the current vogue, hailed as low-cost and easy to build. But laying trolley tracks on busy urban streets is more labor-intensive than it sounds. A separate lane must be created, electric wires must be hung to provide power, and streets often need to be widened to accommodate both trains and autos. There’s also the issue of providing crossing points for pedestrians and vehicles. No matter how many safety precautions are put in place, sooner or later an unlucky driver or walker gets smooshed.

I’m not surprised monorails have never really caught on. They’re far more expensive to build than light rail, the overhead supports are going to be obtrusive, and they don’t really have any big advantages over the two-railed alternative. The arguments the Slate argument makes over collisions with other vehicles and pedestrians is exaggerated; a tram is no more dangerous in that regard to a bus!

The Slate article suggests monorail’s advantage is the ‘fun’ factor.

Besides, if you want a lovely view in a monorail town, simply fork over your fare and watch the scenery zip by at 50 miles per hour. It’s a heck of a lot more entertaining than slogging through a city center via light rail.

As crazy as it may sound, that fun factor counts for something—a lot, in fact. The goal of mass transit is to convince people to abandon their cars, which feature such enticing accessories as CD players and elbow room. Light rails are too buslike to impress most commuters, too squished and close to the ground.

Well maybe. But I can’t say I’m really convinced by his arguments. The light rail system in Manchester has enticed people out of their cars, even when much of the route is a conversion of existing heavy rail lines; ridership on the new trams is significantly higher than the trains they replaced. And it’s twice as fast as the bus.

The monorails is doomed as one of those exciting-looking technologies that never really worked in practice, like airships, they represent a future of the past; something out of old-fashioned science-fiction.

I’m preparing to move back down south after spending two years in Manchester, which sadly means I’ll have to dismantle The Wominseebahn. It probably won’t be rebuilt in it’s present form – my collection of rolling stock (enough to form 12-14 complete trains!) has outgrown the limited capacity of the storage sidings (staging roads for ‘merricuns). Pity it never lasted long enough for much in the way of scenic treatment.

I’m not sure what to do next, layout-wise. I’ll be living at my parent’s place for the next few months, courtesy of the outrageous property prices in the south-east and the lack of IT work outside the south-east. There’s the big 12′x8′ shed that still contains the remains of my old British-outline layout, but I don’t want to start work on a large layout only to have to dismantle it again as soon as I have somewhere more permenant to live.

Alternatively there’s a small alcove indoors with just about enough room for a shunting layout. I’ve already started sketching ideas for a minimum-space layout; something I’ve never tried building before.

Meanwhile I’ve got all this continental stock to reunite with the original boxes. It’s turning out to be a bigger job than I thought…

Ed Driscoll writes about the Napa Valley Wine Train

Imagine traveling in an elegant dining car, full of handsomely dressed passengers, sitting down to tables laid out with white linen, beautiful china and silverware, as you enjoy a meal of chicken prosciutto, baked and stuffed with layers of sauteed spinach, wild mushrooms and provolone cheese with sun dried tomatoes and wild mushroom sauce. Lush fields of California grapes slowly roll by at about ten miles an hour. A few cars ahead, a pair of champagne, burgundy and grapeleaf green Alco FPA-4 locomotives are cutting through the air with their classic blunt noses, with the odd belch of black smoke as a reminder of their turbocharged engines.

Sound like something out of the 1950s, long since vanquished by generic Amtrak Amfleet cars that resemble airplane interiors serving “Amfood” of styrofoam hamburgers and Diet Cokes? Actually, it’s a scene that’s recreated everyday on the Napa Valley Wine Train.

I don’t know that much about railway preservation in America, but I believe there are far fewer preserved lines than in Britain. Over on our side of the pond we have several dozen lines, largely operated by steam locomotives. Most of them are short, and almost all aren’t run as commercial enterprises, relying heavily on volunteers supplying their own time and money to restore and operate the vintage steam and diesel locomotives.

Sometimes I think about the time and energy put into operating these lines and compare it with the money spent on subsidising loss-making rural parts of the national rail network. The preserved railways operate on lines closed in the 1960s and 70s because they were hopelessly uneconomic; many of them are short sections of what were once much longer routes and terminate in the middle nowhere.

Perhaps preservationists should be encouraged to take over loss-making bits of the existing national network? Something like the Central Wales line might be too ambitious, but what about lines like Liskeard-Looe? Run steam-hauled tourist trains in the summer, and run a modern railcar for the all-year round local service.

I’m thinking a bit of some of the small private railways in Switzerland. Most of them are actually publically-owned, by local authorities (‘Private’ here means ‘not owned by the federal government’). Although the day-to-day services use modern equipment, almost all of them seem to hang on to some of the vintage trains they replaced. For instance, the Rhätische Bahn still keeps three steam locomotives in working order on the books, which regularly operate enthusiast’s specials, and can even be hired – I saw one hired for a wedding party, with white ribbons and flowers on the loco!

Cold Spring Shops has an interesting article on how the apparently fragmented METRA system in Chicago works, when the privatised mess we have in Britain doesn’t. (Link from UK Transport).

Interesting railway-themed site, with links to the author Steve Karlson’s O-gauge layout. Could do with some more railway-related blog entries, though!

In an earlier post, I described Atlanta as “Bracknell on Steroids”.

Bracknell is a soulless 1960s new town 25 miles west of London, seemingly built around cars rather than people. As a major centre for IT companies it was the subject of a lot of negative comments in the satirical BackBytes column in Computing.

When I first visited Atlanta, it reminded me of a gigantic version of Bracknell, covering an area the size of Greater London. This Atlanta Journal-Constitution article confirms this; it appears that Atlanta is the 4th most sprawling city in the whole of the US.

I hate sprawls! The one big reason I turned down my ex-employer’s offer to relocate to Atlanta was the fact that it’s simply impossible to survive there without a car. The city lacks the sort of comprehensive public transport networks we have in any British city of similar size. Worse still, the physical layout of the city would make any decent mass transit system prohibitively expensive to construct. Yes, they do have the MARTA network, but it covers only a tiny fraction of the city; and it went nowhere near my ex-employer’s offices. I found most of the bus services in the suburbs are less frequent that the services in rural Cornwall!

Of course one reason American cities sprawl the way they do is that they simply have the space. But how much is due to leaving everything to ‘the market’? On the other hand, who built all those roads that encourage the sprawl?

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Minister attacks Turner art

Culture minister Kim Howells has denounced the modern art up for this year’s Turner Prize as “cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit”.

Mr Howells left a note at the Tate Britain gallery, where the nominated work is on display, saying British art was “lost” if that was the best it could produce.

I’m sure I’m not the only person that thinks that if a piece of ‘Art’ can’t connect in some way to Joe Public, and is comprehensible only to a narrow clique of art students, it’s not really art, but pretentious nonsense. Or does that just make me a hopeless philistine?

The Turner Prize’s best moment was when it was sent up by “The K Foundation” with their competition for the worst piece of art of the year, the nominations for which were just coincidentally the same as the four entrants for the Turner Prize.

What is art anyway? Why not take a model railway layout (preferably an accurate fine-scale layout in the Mostyn league), operate it to a strict prototypical timetable, and call it a piece of performance art? I’m sure at least as much effort goes into researching and building a project like Mostyn as goes into some of the Turner entries, such as that light flashing on and off.

Yes, another posting about Virgin Voyagers. This came in from Matthew Cambourne on the SWRG mailing list. Says it all really.

Almost all of the Virgin staff I have seen today have been saying how much they hate the Voyager. One member of staff thrust his fist in the air on seeing his train was an HST.

This summer on my holiday in the west of England just about every photo I took of a loco-hauled train featured class 47 bashers “flailing” out of the window. As far as I know, nobody suffered the fate of this guy.

But why would someone hang out of the window of a 4-CIG enough to have a fatal encounter with a tunnel? It’s not as if there’s any “thrash” with an electric multiple unit. Sadly the HSE Taliban will use this as an excuse to insist no trains can have windows that open (so no more taking photos from moving trains!)

Of course, the BBC illustrates this with a class 455, which doesn’t have opening windows.