(08-24-2015, 11:57 PM)BuildingScout Wrote: Monorails are elevated, which tends to create an awful shadow below, implies having to climb stairs to reach them and are for the most part unproven technology (Siemens gave up on theirs and sold the technology to China IRC), but they are "the way of the future" ™, because some ignorant science fiction writer decided that in the future we would all wear skin tight uniforms and travel in monorails.
I have to admit I’m not that worried about the shadow from a monorail — the beam isn’t typically that large. Depending on the location, the shadow from a station may be more of a concern. Overall, however, I think the whole “shading the street” issue for elevated rail of any kind is oversold: consider Chicago’s downtown. Sure, some parts of some streets are somewhat closed in, but what for? High quality transit! And even in Chicago, which has a lot of elevated track in a relatively small area, only a few roads are affected at all. I think the requirement for every station, without exception, to be a full-scale subway-style installation is the bigger problem.
I also wouldn’t characterize them as unproven: they are proven to work, and many of them run extremely reliably. What is not proven is that they are cost-effective.
Having said that, I’ve been disappointed to find out how much of a toy some installations are. The Seattle monorail, for example, is something everybody thinks of when they think of Seattle, similar to the CN Tower or the Sydney Opera House. But it turns out that it has just two stations about a mile apart. It has two tracks, two vehicles, and no switches. So topologically it is the same as the Pearson Airport LINK train, minus the middle stop. Except for one small detail: the two tracks form a gauntlet at one end of the line because of the station design. Now you might assume that this is no problem, because obviously if one vehicle is at or near one station, the other will be at or near the other. Wrong! They had a collision once. Clearly they never heard of signal interlocking and train stop devices. But in a sense more strangely, they never heard of bus bunching either, when they’re running the simplest imaginable service. So, all in all an amateur, two-bit operation.
On a related note, Disney has a substantial monorail system. They once had a fatal crash. Reading the details about the NTSB report made me angry because the underlying cause proved that it was an absolutely avoidable crash in several possible ways. One possibility is monorail-related: the train had to back on to the service track. Why? I can’t help but feel that it’s because monorail switches are fantastically expensive, so they skimped on the track layout. At the ION MSF, I believe trains will be able to enter and leave service without backing up.
Getting back to ION, I was at the Seagram Drive crossing yesterday morning. Looks like the first track crossing is done and hooked up to the existing tracks. The space for the second track is excavated across the road and looks packed down, so I’d say they are fairly close to being able to start laying the ballast and ties.