Monorails: Trains Of Tomorrow?
Episode 1.02: Monorails first captured the public imagination as the "trains of the future" here in the U.S., thanks to projects like the Disneyland monorail (1959) and the Seattle World's Fair monorail (1962). But today, it seems that new monorail systems are being built everywhere except America. Monorails have key advantages over competing forms of mass transit, such as buses, subways, and light rail—so what happened to the prospects for the technology in the U.S.? For the answer, Soonish went straight to the president of the Monorail Society, a 7,000-strong group with members around the world. And we traveled to Seattle to talk to the people who built—and who still run—the Seattle Center Monorail, and who tried to get a much larger monorail project off the ground in the early 2000s. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Grant Fikes.