 | |
| Industry | Passenger transportation |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1953 |
| Defunct | 1964 |
| Successor | Krupp |
| Headquarters | Fühlingen, Germany |
Alweg was a transportation company based in Germany known for pioneering straddle-beam monorails. [1] [2]
| | |
| Industry | Passenger transportation |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1953 |
| Defunct | 1964 |
| Successor | Krupp |
| Headquarters | Fühlingen, Germany |
Alweg was a transportation company based in Germany known for pioneering straddle-beam monorails. [1] [2]
Alweg was founded by Swedish industrial magnate Dr. Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren in January 1953 as Alweg-Forschung, GmbH (Alweg Research Corporation), based in Fühlingen, a suburb of Cologne, Germany. The company was an outgrowth of the Verkehrsbahn-Studiengesellschaft (Transit Railway Study Group), which had already presented its first monorail designs and prototypes in the previous year. The Alweg name is an acronym derived from Dr. Wenner-Gren's full name. [2]
Alweg is best remembered for their role in building the original Disneyland Monorail System at Disneyland, which opened in 1959, and the Seattle Center Monorail, which opened for the 1962 Century 21 Exposition. [3] Both systems remain operational, with the Seattle Center Monorail still using the original Alweg trains which have traveled over one million miles. A third system, built in Turin for the Italia 61 exposition remained unused a few months after the exposition closed and was destroyed by a fire in the late 1970s, most probably set by vandals. The remnants of the system were scrapped in 1981, with the north station repurposed as an office building.
In 1963, Alweg put forward a proposal to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for a monorail system that would be designed, built, operated and maintained within Los Angeles County, California by Alweg. Alweg promised to take all financial risk for the construction with the cost of the system to be recovered through fares collected. The supervisors voted down the proposal, mostly due to political pressures from Standard Oil of California and General Motors, which were strong advocates for automobile dependency. [4] [5] This move was greatly resented by famed author Ray Bradbury who supported the monorail project [6] and resented the later move to build a subway in Los Angeles. [7]
Alweg's technology was licensed in 1960 by Hitachi Monorail [ citation needed ], which continues to construct monorails based on Alweg technology around the world. What was for decades the world's busiest monorail line, the Tokyo Monorail, was completed in 1964 by what was then the Hitachi-Alweg division of Hitachi, and today's busiest monorail system, Chongqing Rail Transit, is also based on Alweg and Hitachi technology.
After Alweg ran into financial difficulties, Alweg's German operations were taken over by Krupp. Krupp wound up all Alweg operations by 1964. [1]
In the 1960s there was a plan to build an Alweg monorail in the High Tatras in Slovakia.
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The Tokyo Monorail, officially the Tokyo Monorail Haneda Airport Line, is a straddle-beam, Alweg-type monorail line in Tokyo, Japan. It is an airport rail link that connects Tokyo International Airport (Haneda) to Tokyo's Ōta, Shinagawa, and Minato wards. The 17.8-kilometer (11.1 mi) line serves 11 stations between the Monorail Hamamatsuchō and Haneda Airport Terminal 2 stations. It runs on a predominantly elevated north–south route that follows the western coast of Tokyo Bay. The monorail is operated by the Tokyo Monorail Co., Ltd., which is jointly owned by JR East, the system's rolling stock supplier Hitachi, and ANA Holdings, Inc.. It carried an average of 140,173 passengers per day in 2018.
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Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren was a Swedish entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest men in the world during the 1930s.
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The Disneyland Monorail is an attraction and transportation line at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, United States. It was the first daily operating monorail in the world.
C. Lemoine Blanchard was a businessman who was a member of the Los Angeles City Council from 1959 until 1963 and a board member of the national YMCA.
Westlake Park is a 0.1-acre (400 m2) public plaza in Downtown Seattle, Washington, United States. It was designed by Robert Mitchell Hanna.
SelTrac is a digital railway signalling technology used to automatically control the movements of rail vehicles. It was the first fully automatic moving-block signalling system to be commercially implemented.
The Mark VI monorail (Mk6) is a monorail train used in the Walt Disney World Monorail System and the Las Vegas Monorail. The Mark VI started replacing the Mark IV monorails at Walt Disney World in 1989, replacing the final Mark IV by 1991. The Mark VI later replaced the two ex-WDW Mark IV monorail sets of the Las Vegas Monorail in 2004. The Las Vegas M-VI versions of the trains differ from the Walt Disney World trains in physical appearance and the fact that they are automated, a trait the Walt Disney World monorails lacked until their automation starting in 2014.
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Hitachi, Ltd. Railway Systems Business Unit, trading as Hitachi Rail, is the rolling stock and railway signalling manufacturing division of Hitachi.
A suspension railway is a form of elevated monorail in which the vehicle is suspended from a fixed track, which is built above streets, waterways, or existing railway track.
The Sepulveda Transit Corridor is a two-phased planned transit corridor that aims to connect the Los Angeles Basin to the San Fernando Valley through Sepulveda Pass in Los Angeles, California, by supplementing the existing I-405 freeway through the pass. The corridor would partly parallel I-405, and proposed alternatives include heavy rail rapid transit or a monorail line connecting the G Line in the Valley to the D Line and E Line on the Westside, and the K Line near Los Angeles International Airport.
Thiruvananthapuram Metro is a proposed rapid transit system in the city of Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the Indian state of Kerala. Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of Kerala, is all set to have its metro system. Earlier, there was a plan to build a light metro system in the city. However, the plan was later changed to a conventional metro system.
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