There is a semi-famous video from 1902 recording a ride on the then new Schwebebahn. MoMa digitised it and someone on Youtube did a side-by-side-recording of 1902 vs. 2015:
There are two other suspended monorails in the Ruhr are, both driver-less and shorter, built in the 80s and 90s by Siemens, the H-Bahn at Dortmund University and the Skytrain at Düsseldorf Airport. I drove the H-Bahn daily, because computer science back then was distributed all about the campus. Still have fond memories about it. (Less so about the degree.) The Tim Traveller on Youtube recently did a video about it:
I lived in the student housing at the… southern campus? The apartment buildings that are in Eichlingenhofen. But I went to the FH not the TU which is in the other site of campus. I spent a lot of time on the H-Bahn. It’s super cute and feels kinda sci-fi-ish.
Last xmas my kids and I stayed over in Wuppertal on the way back home from family just to check out the Schwebebahn and it didn't disappoint! It makes what would otherwise be a relatively ordinary Ruhrgebiet-style German city (ie mostly ugly), a uniquely beautiful walk. It's also awesome that the Schwebebahn is just regular public transport. You can get up into one of the stops, buy an obscenely cheap ticket (like 1 euro per person or something, I forgot), and ride it out.
I liked being under it even more than being on it - the combination of the post-WWII buildings with the nature around the river and the early industrial Schwebebahn heavy metal design gives the riverside a very unique, slightly dieselpunk, atmosphere.
I wouldn't say it's worth a trip on its own but it was definitely worth a detour for us!
Wuppertal Schwebebahn is wonderful to watch in person. Sometimes my ICE goes through Wuppertal and it looks cyberpunk when the conditions are right.
Many people don’t know that Margao, Goa also planned and tested the same H-Bahn system. I witnessed these Skybuses when I was visiting Margao back then. It was an interesting experiment which failed unfortunately.
A lot of people are very against "gadgetbahns" which are unorthodox means of transportation that are often quite expensive. But I love these unique vehicles! And it is very satisfying when one of them actually works out in an economical sense.
They generally work. However if you go with standard and thus cheaper technology you can get more transit for the same money. Transit should be about getting people places not the interesting vehicels.
They generally aren't real proposals in the first place (see hyperloop). They're usually vaporware used to frustrate a real transit proposal, analogous to e.g. deflecting proposals to move to a memory safe language by saying that you're going to use a safe subset of C++ that's going to be defined and standardised real soon now.
Excep c++ is standard, we hake alot of it and plenty of people who know it. You have instead made the counter my arguement. Sometimes new is better and you need to move on. However the safe c++ subset (if it arrives and works as promised) might be better because we have all that c++ and rust doesn't interoperate with it well. (again rust would be better if we had it in 1970 but we didn't.)
Notably the system works for substantially larger swinging angles (the structure gets somewhat heavier to leave that much more free space), and one could bank the track in turns, too.
Together some impressive g forces could be archived; 1 horizontal g for a total of sqrt(2) would be barely beyond the wuppertal geometry's capabilities; 2 horizontal g for sqrt(3) total are still fairly realistic if the passengers/cargo tolerate.
You basically save having to go through mountains to keep speed, as you can go through a curvy valley.
2 g horizontal results in sqrt(2^2+1^2)g = sqrt(5)g swinging out at tan^(-1)(2) = 63.5 degrees from the perpendicular direction (probably overswinging a bit depending on track design and speed). Would be good fun on a commute. Hopefully the inner part of the superstructure doesn’t come out of the ground.
Passengers have fairly low tolerance for forces on a daily traveling mode of transport. Your average commuter wants to be able to hold a hot coffee without scalding themselves.
Genuine question: wouldn’t we still be able to do that? Im imagining similar behavior to swinging cup of water around on a string. The liquid experiences the same acceleration and “settles” within the new orientation of the container.
I’ve made a day trip to Wuppertal, specifically for the purpose of taking this train. I grew up on the other side of the planet in a completely different culture, but in my youth I saw a “telescreen article” during some film matinee pause, about this “quaint, German thing” and as I grew older and found myself actually living in Germany, one of my first thoughts was “I wonder if that thing still exists” .. so I was very happy to learn it was still in operation, indeed.
Germany is a land full of beautiful little towns and cities and settlements which deserve to be explored with the proper tempo. On a particularly sunny day I drove to Wuppertal from the village I’d moved to in the Rühr, in my beat up Citroën (that’s another quaint European device worthy of a story), deciding to eschew the autobahn and instead take the older country roads where I could, and for an hour or so I was transported back to another Germany, the pre-war late 19th century land of much promise, whose roads and paths were set, seemingly, with a far greater sense of aesthetics than the speedy efficiency-worshipping channels of the highways. So many little roads and lanes which ‘felt’ as if the original architects were bovine in nature, or perhaps based on an ancient feeding route of deer and boar.
When I arrived in Wuppertal, I was immediately impressed with this technological marvel that had been suspended in the space above 700-year old houses and buildings from another time. It felt so futuristic and hopeful, and it was futuristic and hopeful - and more important to the Germans, useful as a device for getting around the serpentine Wuppertal construct. I parked the Citroën in the lower part of the town, watching it deflate itself like some Lucas’ian landracer, walked up to the nearest Schweberbahn station, and took the thing all the way up and down the Wupper. It was delightful, at first, seeming to be so whimsical and expensive, but as we reached the end of the line, I was struck by how suddenly mundane the experience had become.
It was normal to fly over the river, suspended, above the height of a regular commute, curving through the spaces between buildings rather than under them, and I was delighted to recognize the buildings - now a hundred years older - that I had seen in the original film, still in place yet somehow cleaner than I’d remembered. Even still, in a matter of an hour, I’d experienced that whiplash of “this is the future (of the past) ..” straight to “this is normal now (yet weird) ..” so many of us technologists endure — but in this case, it was with a device from an entirely different century. It was archaic futurist whiplash, not at all entirely like the modern kind, but similar somehow.
I took it back down to my Citroën, noting the gravity change along the way, and found I had a new form of respect for even that vehicles’ weird, quaint, suspension. (That particular model raised and lowered itself according to speed, you see..)
That trip to Wuppertal was one of the very first events in my life in Germany which gave me so much more respect for the German people than the post-war indoctrination and cultural distrust I’d experienced as a kid growing up in a state that was once at war with the place.
If you ever get a chance to visit Germany, a day trip outside the realm of the autobahn is highly recommended.
Simply get lost in the place.
Because of Wuppertal I became finely tuned to appreciate the German instinct for preservation of older things, while also somehow managing to integrate technological progress which doesn’t just supplant the surroundings, but eventually enhances them.
My grandfather emigrated from Vohwinkel in 1921. I imagine he rode it quite a bit while training as a locksmith. I've always wanted to see it in person.
I found the address he used to live at... it's an empty lot on a corner. 8(
Wuppertal is an unusually elongated, "linear" city, isn't it? Along the Wupper valley. I could see that being appropriate for a monorail; does it extend along the long axis?
Monorails are only really beautiful in jurisdictions that don’t require emergency walkways along the length. If a place requires that, then the visual bulk is no different from a normal railway.
I think the main problem with suspended monorails is that they're more expensive to build unless the tracks are already going to have to be elevated for 100% of their length due to other constraints.
As long as that's the case, it doesn't seem like they really have any significant disadvantages compared to normal trains.
But otherwise, by choosing a monorail you're going from being able to run some parts of the tracks on the ground with very little cost/effort to not being able to run any of them directly on the ground for very little benefit aside from looking cool.
Going all elevated is good as it gets you out of traffic and thus allows for more speed. The problem is sometimes you want to go undergroud. The other problem is while material costs should be cheaper there is no standard and so you but more custom parts and them when something wears out you pay one off prices to replace it. use standard rails and you can buy more mass produced parts which brings your cost down.
I think the movie Minority Report had a really cool concept of a sort of "semi-suspended" railway: The machinery that connected to the rails could rotate all around the train car, so depending on the environment, the tracks could go below the car, above the car, or even beside the car, which would allow it to use sheer walls as "ramps".
I'm not sure if something like this would in any way be physically feasible, but if yes, it might solve the cost problem, because part of the rails could then be run on the ground.
(Maybe a less sci-fi version would be a "hybrid" car that has a second set of wheels on the underside and could switch between ordinary and overhead rails as needed?)
I think they are good in limits. I love the occasional one, but as a very common solution I'd prefer elevated walkway systems like in Hong Kong which leaves the sun and view to pedestrians. Of course the occasional monorail is a huge win and, add you say, beautiful
I've studied in Wuppertal and have very fond memories of the Schwebebahn.
Some people get very sick while riding it, which is probably due to the train slightly swinging in its stations. That's rather unsual and some bodies can't handle it that well.
It was always funny to "test" who is affected by that with new students during their first week.
If you have the chance: Ride the Schwebebahn from end station to end station and have a look at the city from above. Wuppertal is probably a good example of and old industrial city struggling to find its way into modern times.
There is a semi-famous video from 1902 recording a ride on the then new Schwebebahn. MoMa digitised it and someone on Youtube did a side-by-side-recording of 1902 vs. 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TqqdOcX4dc
There are two other suspended monorails in the Ruhr are, both driver-less and shorter, built in the 80s and 90s by Siemens, the H-Bahn at Dortmund University and the Skytrain at Düsseldorf Airport. I drove the H-Bahn daily, because computer science back then was distributed all about the campus. Still have fond memories about it. (Less so about the degree.) The Tim Traveller on Youtube recently did a video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kwpj1UOrhs
I lived in the student housing at the… southern campus? The apartment buildings that are in Eichlingenhofen. But I went to the FH not the TU which is in the other site of campus. I spent a lot of time on the H-Bahn. It’s super cute and feels kinda sci-fi-ish.
Last xmas my kids and I stayed over in Wuppertal on the way back home from family just to check out the Schwebebahn and it didn't disappoint! It makes what would otherwise be a relatively ordinary Ruhrgebiet-style German city (ie mostly ugly), a uniquely beautiful walk. It's also awesome that the Schwebebahn is just regular public transport. You can get up into one of the stops, buy an obscenely cheap ticket (like 1 euro per person or something, I forgot), and ride it out.
I liked being under it even more than being on it - the combination of the post-WWII buildings with the nature around the river and the early industrial Schwebebahn heavy metal design gives the riverside a very unique, slightly dieselpunk, atmosphere.
I wouldn't say it's worth a trip on its own but it was definitely worth a detour for us!
If you learn about the Wuppertal suspended monorail, you should also read about Tuffi, the elephant that jumped off of it in 1950.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuffi
The video contains a segment about Tuffi.
Wuppertal Schwebebahn is wonderful to watch in person. Sometimes my ICE goes through Wuppertal and it looks cyberpunk when the conditions are right.
Many people don’t know that Margao, Goa also planned and tested the same H-Bahn system. I witnessed these Skybuses when I was visiting Margao back then. It was an interesting experiment which failed unfortunately.
https://youtu.be/SUarfX3BrIg
A lot of people are very against "gadgetbahns" which are unorthodox means of transportation that are often quite expensive. But I love these unique vehicles! And it is very satisfying when one of them actually works out in an economical sense.
They generally work. However if you go with standard and thus cheaper technology you can get more transit for the same money. Transit should be about getting people places not the interesting vehicels.
That is why so many are against gadgetbahns.
They generally aren't real proposals in the first place (see hyperloop). They're usually vaporware used to frustrate a real transit proposal, analogous to e.g. deflecting proposals to move to a memory safe language by saying that you're going to use a safe subset of C++ that's going to be defined and standardised real soon now.
Excep c++ is standard, we hake alot of it and plenty of people who know it. You have instead made the counter my arguement. Sometimes new is better and you need to move on. However the safe c++ subset (if it arrives and works as promised) might be better because we have all that c++ and rust doesn't interoperate with it well. (again rust would be better if we had it in 1970 but we didn't.)
Notably the system works for substantially larger swinging angles (the structure gets somewhat heavier to leave that much more free space), and one could bank the track in turns, too. Together some impressive g forces could be archived; 1 horizontal g for a total of sqrt(2) would be barely beyond the wuppertal geometry's capabilities; 2 horizontal g for sqrt(3) total are still fairly realistic if the passengers/cargo tolerate.
You basically save having to go through mountains to keep speed, as you can go through a curvy valley.
2 g horizontal results in sqrt(2^2+1^2)g = sqrt(5)g swinging out at tan^(-1)(2) = 63.5 degrees from the perpendicular direction (probably overswinging a bit depending on track design and speed). Would be good fun on a commute. Hopefully the inner part of the superstructure doesn’t come out of the ground.
Passengers have fairly low tolerance for forces on a daily traveling mode of transport. Your average commuter wants to be able to hold a hot coffee without scalding themselves.
Genuine question: wouldn’t we still be able to do that? Im imagining similar behavior to swinging cup of water around on a string. The liquid experiences the same acceleration and “settles” within the new orientation of the container.
Yes the same as an airplane turning, you don’t spill your coffee on a banked turn
so long as the turn is coordinated! https://pilotinstitute.com/turn-coordinator/
I’ve made a day trip to Wuppertal, specifically for the purpose of taking this train. I grew up on the other side of the planet in a completely different culture, but in my youth I saw a “telescreen article” during some film matinee pause, about this “quaint, German thing” and as I grew older and found myself actually living in Germany, one of my first thoughts was “I wonder if that thing still exists” .. so I was very happy to learn it was still in operation, indeed.
Germany is a land full of beautiful little towns and cities and settlements which deserve to be explored with the proper tempo. On a particularly sunny day I drove to Wuppertal from the village I’d moved to in the Rühr, in my beat up Citroën (that’s another quaint European device worthy of a story), deciding to eschew the autobahn and instead take the older country roads where I could, and for an hour or so I was transported back to another Germany, the pre-war late 19th century land of much promise, whose roads and paths were set, seemingly, with a far greater sense of aesthetics than the speedy efficiency-worshipping channels of the highways. So many little roads and lanes which ‘felt’ as if the original architects were bovine in nature, or perhaps based on an ancient feeding route of deer and boar.
When I arrived in Wuppertal, I was immediately impressed with this technological marvel that had been suspended in the space above 700-year old houses and buildings from another time. It felt so futuristic and hopeful, and it was futuristic and hopeful - and more important to the Germans, useful as a device for getting around the serpentine Wuppertal construct. I parked the Citroën in the lower part of the town, watching it deflate itself like some Lucas’ian landracer, walked up to the nearest Schweberbahn station, and took the thing all the way up and down the Wupper. It was delightful, at first, seeming to be so whimsical and expensive, but as we reached the end of the line, I was struck by how suddenly mundane the experience had become.
It was normal to fly over the river, suspended, above the height of a regular commute, curving through the spaces between buildings rather than under them, and I was delighted to recognize the buildings - now a hundred years older - that I had seen in the original film, still in place yet somehow cleaner than I’d remembered. Even still, in a matter of an hour, I’d experienced that whiplash of “this is the future (of the past) ..” straight to “this is normal now (yet weird) ..” so many of us technologists endure — but in this case, it was with a device from an entirely different century. It was archaic futurist whiplash, not at all entirely like the modern kind, but similar somehow.
I took it back down to my Citroën, noting the gravity change along the way, and found I had a new form of respect for even that vehicles’ weird, quaint, suspension. (That particular model raised and lowered itself according to speed, you see..)
That trip to Wuppertal was one of the very first events in my life in Germany which gave me so much more respect for the German people than the post-war indoctrination and cultural distrust I’d experienced as a kid growing up in a state that was once at war with the place.
If you ever get a chance to visit Germany, a day trip outside the realm of the autobahn is highly recommended.
Simply get lost in the place.
Because of Wuppertal I became finely tuned to appreciate the German instinct for preservation of older things, while also somehow managing to integrate technological progress which doesn’t just supplant the surroundings, but eventually enhances them.
Seeing Wuppertal on the start-page of hackernews wasn't something on my bingo card lol
Lol, I first parsed the title as "the monorail _project_ having been suspended" (=halted)
I went for a ride back in March of this year. It’s a cool piece of engineering.
We rode it to the Engels museum and the sculpture park, Wuppertal was worth the day trip from Cologne.
[dead]
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/ungluecke/schweres-...
No thanks. I prefer my vehicles not to be able to fall 12 metres to the ground by default.
[dead]
I love the Schwebebahn, and there's this funky song about it :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Ifi3wl550
Check out meelman, he's a rap artist from Wuppertal, the Schwebebahn is a reoccuring theme in his songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6jDQpSOdoc
My grandfather emigrated from Vohwinkel in 1921. I imagine he rode it quite a bit while training as a locksmith. I've always wanted to see it in person.
I found the address he used to live at... it's an empty lot on a corner. 8(
This is an opportunity to use the world's least used emoji
Needs more woopers. 'o'
So, it seems a falling elephant wouldn't splash if it splashed into the river.
A reverence to areal event https://youtu.be/IrMNQP4sJnA?si=M13ENQoLMY5PTFyj
you seem to have linked an Ad
Wuppertal is an unusually elongated, "linear" city, isn't it? Along the Wupper valley. I could see that being appropriate for a monorail; does it extend along the long axis?
I wish we had more monorails and viaducts. They're useful, leave the ground infrastructure unimpeded, and are honestly beautiful to look at.
Monorails are only really beautiful in jurisdictions that don’t require emergency walkways along the length. If a place requires that, then the visual bulk is no different from a normal railway.
Maybe. Compare the Las Vegas Monorail with aerial sections of BART. But BART is heavy rail, with serious speed and capacity.
I think the main problem with suspended monorails is that they're more expensive to build unless the tracks are already going to have to be elevated for 100% of their length due to other constraints.
As long as that's the case, it doesn't seem like they really have any significant disadvantages compared to normal trains.
But otherwise, by choosing a monorail you're going from being able to run some parts of the tracks on the ground with very little cost/effort to not being able to run any of them directly on the ground for very little benefit aside from looking cool.
Going all elevated is good as it gets you out of traffic and thus allows for more speed. The problem is sometimes you want to go undergroud. The other problem is while material costs should be cheaper there is no standard and so you but more custom parts and them when something wears out you pay one off prices to replace it. use standard rails and you can buy more mass produced parts which brings your cost down.
I think the movie Minority Report had a really cool concept of a sort of "semi-suspended" railway: The machinery that connected to the rails could rotate all around the train car, so depending on the environment, the tracks could go below the car, above the car, or even beside the car, which would allow it to use sheer walls as "ramps".
I'm not sure if something like this would in any way be physically feasible, but if yes, it might solve the cost problem, because part of the rails could then be run on the ground.
(Maybe a less sci-fi version would be a "hybrid" car that has a second set of wheels on the underside and could switch between ordinary and overhead rails as needed?)
I think they are good in limits. I love the occasional one, but as a very common solution I'd prefer elevated walkway systems like in Hong Kong which leaves the sun and view to pedestrians. Of course the occasional monorail is a huge win and, add you say, beautiful
I've studied in Wuppertal and have very fond memories of the Schwebebahn.
Some people get very sick while riding it, which is probably due to the train slightly swinging in its stations. That's rather unsual and some bodies can't handle it that well.
It was always funny to "test" who is affected by that with new students during their first week.
If you have the chance: Ride the Schwebebahn from end station to end station and have a look at the city from above. Wuppertal is probably a good example of and old industrial city struggling to find its way into modern times.
unspeakable