Disneyland Alweg Monorail System

I hear those things are awful loud!

—every single one of you on reading the subject of this article

I have actually ridden on two monorails in my life, which is two more than most people in the US. What’s more, one of them was not the creation of the Walt Disney Industrial Complex, though it was built by the same company that inspired Disney to build his. Frankly, I find them to be a more practical system around here than a subway, given how many cities in the Pacific Northwest are built on mudflats. We have a high water table; monorails make a lot more sense.

The first monorail prototype was built in 1820. Wikipedia, in fact, has a truly terrifying picture of a gyroscopic railroad from 1909. In 1953, Swedish industrialist Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren, a strange man who seems to have been a personal friend of Göring but not actually a Nazi agent, established the Alweg company in Fühlingen, then-West Germany, a suburb of Cologne. Three years later, the first monorail in the US opened in Houston. Three years after that, the Disneyland monorail opened and has been running ever since.

It seems that the presence of the monorail was one of the things in the park inspired by Walt’s travels in Europe, though at the time the monorail in existence was a hanging basket-style. Which Lillian hated. The Wuppertal monorail is apparently extremely uncomfortable to ride, and it took corners in a way that made Lillian feel ill. Walt felt that it caged the riders so they didn’t get the clear view of the attractions that were after all the point of Disneyland. I don’t know how he learned of the Alweg system, but its smoother ride and better view made it a fit for the park.

When it opened, the Disneyland monorail only served as an attraction. It had, on opening day, one stop and did a simple loop around Tomorrowland. Nobody wants to give me an original route map, so I don’t know exactly how the track has changed, but within a few years it would start serving the Disneyland Hotel. That was the status quo for decades, and eventually it was replaced by the Downtown Disney station with the expansion.

The opening was a gala occasion, presided over by then-Vice President Richard Nixon. He had the giant novelty scissors as per spec, but as everyone delights in pointing out, they didn’t actually work. Walt had to reach out and physically tear the ribbon with his hands. There’s a metaphor there for how little work Eisenhower said Nixon did during his time as VP, but we’re going to move on from that.

It’s a bit hard to process that the monorail was an E-ticket in its day, but there we are. These days, it’s at its busiest at the end of the day, as people who are staying in the hotels don’t want to walk out of the park and across Downtown Disney to get back to their rooms, and as someone who did that the last time she stayed at Disneyland, I don’t blame them. But it is a lovely ride, and I took it even as a child just to get a view of things. I mean, also it was air conditioned and a place to sit down, but yeah.

There was, some years ago, a campaign to extend the Seattle monorail to make it run actually far enough to be a real transit option, and one of the arguments against it was that there weren’t enough people who used it to commute. This was a silly argument, because the Seattle monorail runs less than a mile—less than half the length of the Disneyland route. It’s definitely a better choice than walking, but it’s not a real commute. Apparently Matt Groening quite likes monorails but what are you going to do; if it’s The Simpsons, things go wrong.

The longest, and it seems busiest, monorail system in the world is a sixty-mile route in Chongqing, China, which exists as a concept because the area is too hilly to make regular railroads feasible. It works as a transportation system. It’s wider than the Disneyland system, apparently closer to heavy rail than light rail. The most recent thought of expanding the Seattle system was rejected and we’re getting more light rail instead. Which is fine, I guess.

But honestly, I like a monorail. I like the idea of being able to see what’s around me, and goodness knows the scenery between Seattle and Olympia—or, hey, Seattle and Portland—is prettier than downtown Anaheim. When I was a child, there were three rides we took that gave us views of Tomorrowland, and it’s left a fondness for that kind of view. I have lingering memories of the view from above, and it’s lovely.