Another week begins and it’s indistinguishable from every other lockdown week as the routine doesn’t really vary – unless you count doing the same things in a different order, just to try and add some variety and a frisson of excitement as this is about as good as it gets right now!
Therefore I won’t bore you with the mundanities of life, I’ll cut straight to the chase and take you to the picture of the day. This one comes from the latest batch of old slide scans which will be added to my website tomorrow. I took it near Darling Harbour, Sydney, Australia in the last week of January 1998.
With the Sydney Tower in the background, the monorail passes over the heads of tourists walking to the harbour. Monorails have never really taken off as a means of mass transit, mainly due to their low-speed, limited capacity and inflexibility.
Sydney’s monorail was an eight station, 2.2 mile loop that opened in July 1988. It connected Darling Harbour, Chinatown and the central business and shopping districts in an anti-clockwise loop. Six trains of seven cars worked services on the loop, working from a depot in Pyrmont. The never met its passenger projects and the last franchise that operated it was bought out by the New South Wales Government in 2012. On June 30th 2013 the monorail was closed to make way for the new Sydney Convention and Exhibition centre. The monorail tracks were dismantled shortly afterwards.
2 cars from one of the trains and a short section of track are preserved at the Powerhouse museum in Sydney.
Whilst monorails haven’t had much success, one operates in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia (opened in 2003) and another in Melaka. Another (larger) system in Bangkok, Thailand is due to open later this year. There are other systems dotted around the world, mostly in China and Japan, but most as short systems serving amusement parks or airports, like this suspended system in Dusseldorf, Germany. Of course, Germany also has the father of them all, in Wuppertal!
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Paul Bigland 
For me the world’s most impressive monorail is still the Shanghai Maglev. 19 miles in a standing to standing time of 7m20s is really something, and that was back in 2005. Sad that its future was doomed by the Transrapud accident in Germany – until then this technology was a serious contender for the route to Beijing.
That’s another thing, back in 2005 HS2 was already being talked about, more so than heavy rail to Beijing in fact, and yet here we are with HS2 still many years away and the route north of Birmingham probably mothballed for many more years beyond the meagre 110 mile route to Birmingham. Yet China have now had their 400+ mile Beijing route in full operation for some years already. By comparison our transport progress in the UK is seriously embarrassing!
The Shangai Maglev was always going to be a white elephant. It was a showcase for the technology, little more. Expensive to build and operate, with no connectivity to a wider network, it was no real competition to high-speed rail. Now the metro serves the airport, many passengers have abandoned it.
As for HS2, “Mothballed” North of Birmingham? Hardly. The Phase 2a bill for the route to Crewe will gain Royal Assent any day now and tenders are already out for construction contracts. It’s happening.
Phase 2b from Crewe to Manchester is also certain. The only question-mark is over the Eastern leg to Leeds as that’s being integrated into ‘High-Speed North’, the plans for which are still being finalised.
Thanks for the reply, but the Shanghai Maglev was more than just a showcase. When I visited in the Transrapid offices in Shanghai in 2005 I discussed the project with both German and Chinese engineers who were actively involved in designs for running it to Beijing and other places.
All of them were quite open about it being a showcase project as relations between the two countries were very strong, and the Chinese welcomed the Pudong Airport Maglev as a way to sell technology under a Chinese banner, to their people and visitors. But the German test track accident in 2006 and the inevitable publicity surrounding it more or less killed off the advancement of new routes at a stroke, because heavy rail was tried and tested and won the day. But had the Chinese HS rail accident of 2011 happened five years earlier, and the German Transrapid accident not happened, then things might have been very different.
Finally on Maglev, I don’t get your “no connectivity” point. If connections between HS1 and HS2 can be so unimportant then singling out the Shanghai airport route for such a failing seems a bit hollow. In any case, if the Chinese had wanted it connected eventually, it would have happened – they don’t believe in huge legal cases and years of delays to satisfy small pressure groups when the prosperity of the country is in question. I’m not advocating that way of Government, I’m just stating a fact – a fact which has been quite influential with the German-Chinese technological symbiosis!
As for HS2, it isn’t really the Manchester bit I’m concerned about, it’s particularly Sheffield, Leeds, Tyneside and Scotland. I said on your pages a couple of weeks ago that I think the whole of HS2 should have been started in the North, as Northern city pairs benefit much more from time savings and lower costs than the London-Birmingham section does. The very fact that London-Birmingham is advancing ahead of HS2 anywhere else will always be (understandably) seen as yet another London-centric project with incidental offshoots, even if the North does go ahead in many more years’ time.
Always happy to discuss, and always with constructive intent!