Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Monorail


In amongst three wheeled taxis and old busses, the city of Madgaon (Marga) in India, has a brand new high-tech suspended monorail, the "Konkan Railway Skybus", on high concrete pilons. The photo shows two monorail cars at the station. The story I got from a taxi driver was that one of the engineers was killed on a test run and the train has not run since. This shows that while India is full of competent engineers and astute business people they are not immune from folly. There are very few successful monorails in the world, such as the Schwebebahn at Wuppertal. A conventional train running on an elevated track, such as the Brisbane Airport Airtrain, would be far more useful as a transport system. But then Sydney has its own failed monorail.

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