Build Your Own Monorail

jpatokal writes "Building your own roller coaster may be fun, but how about something a little more practical -- like a monorail in your back yard? Kim Petersen designed his from scratch, building the elevated track from wood, scavenging the engine from a motorized walker and handcrafting the train from sheet metal. Total cost: $4000! See the photo tour and the construction history."

Mirror

[BrianGa]

Google [google.com] has a cache [216.239.51.100] of the text.

/.ed already....

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh...

Here's [216.239.51.100] the google cache.

And in case you don't trust an anonymous post:

http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:colgaaDa9rM C: www.monorails.org/tMspages/Niles.html+&hl=en&ie=UT F8

In case of emergency... er... slashdotting...

[cscx]

Click here! [archive.org]

Dont mod me down if it becomes un /. ed

[spike hay]

Seems to be /.ed. Here are the google caches:

main page [216.239.37.100]

monorail history [216.239.37.100]

Photo tour [216.239.37.100]

Other railroads nearby

[Animats]

It's appropriate that this is in Niles. It's the home of the Niles Canyon Railway [ncry.org], a full-scale hobby railroad.

Also nearby is the Redwood Valley Railroad [redwoodvalleyrailway.com], which is in slightly larger scale than the monorail and runs half-scale steam trains. Redwood Valley has quite a layout, with a roundhouse, turntable, sidings, bridges, and tunnels.

Niles was once the Western terminus of the first transcontinental railroad. So there's much railroad history there.

Re:Dont mod me down if it becomes un /. ed

[lostchicken]

Hey! This could be the first time that more than 10 people have gone to the monorails.org in a day.

Look around when you're there, and you'll learn why the monorail is a practical, underused, safe form of transport. It's been stigmatized by Disney. (I've been a monorail advocate for some time) It's a very cool site.

Monorails in modern transit

[jpatokal]

Monorails don't really have any place in modern transit. They don't really save any space advantage(the limiting factor is the width of the cars, not of the track) and they aren't any more efficient than your everyday lightrail or subway or whatever else you feel like building. In addition, they tend to be less efficient, and also less stable in turns and such.

The friendly folks at the Monorail Society [monorails.org] might disagree with you on that. Monorails are an efficient solution for crowded cities, since they can be built in the air, and as (by definition) the car is wider than the track they use less space than light rail. Their speed and capacity are more than sufficient for most applications, and they cost a lot less than building subways. This is why there has been a bit of a monorail renaissance lately, with cities as diverse as Las Vegas, Chiba, Kuala Lumpur and Okinawa (Naha) building monorail systems.

Cheers,
-j.