8.26.2004

life in monorail

miceage has some great photos of disney's "deconstruction" of monorail orange. there's also more on this disney sponsored reverse engineering of the monorail at the disney blog:

Disneyland's celebrated Monorail fleet has served the park well since 1959. We're currently on the Mark V, the third version to be used at Disneyland. Mark VI is currently in use at WDW. But the years have taken their toll on the fleet and its time for another upgrade to the system. Last year the park put out RFBs to the major monorail manufacturers, but they either couldn't meet Disney's demands and price constraints, or they just didn't have time to fit Disneyland in their manufacturing schedule (as was rumored to be the case with Bombardier, Disney's original partner for the WDW Mark VI models and the new Las Vegas Monorail). This has resulted in Disneyland taking the unusual step of reverse engineering the current Mark V in order to modernize the fleet on their own.

i just find it slightly delightful that disney is reverse engineering something for a change. before they started farming stuff out to the lowest bidder, disney was fairly well known for doing most everything in house via imagineering. i just hope that the new revision of monorail trains are true to the originals while updating the interior.

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