We made a weekend trip to Wuppertal, mostly to see the monorail. It’s a working alternative to the tram, transporting people between various parts of the city, and has been doing so for 125 years.
I admit I was disappointed that I saw no traces of the footpaths for the elephants which were originally used to pull the carriages, as I understand it. I shouldn’t have been surprised, to be honest, the last time an elephant was near the line was in the 1950s. I admit I was also disappointed to discover that, despite the line’s steampunk feel, the trains weren’t powered by enthusiastically pedalling drivers and passengers, but by plain old electricity.
It’s a working railway line. The tracks are above the train, and there’s only one of them, but it’s still a working railway line.
When a train stops at a station, passengers get on and off, and, as they do so, the train sways slightly. That natural swaying is much stronger as the train rounds one of the many bends (it follows the course of a river; rivers are not famous for their straight lines). They naturally bank: so much so, in fact, that I felt no motion sickness as they did so. My wife, who is unfortunately very susceptible to that, was fine.
I found out about the Wuppertal monorail as a schoolboy, and was fascinated. That fascination aged with me, yet never went away. We finally took the chance to visit the town, and the monorail, last weekend. It is still a working railway, if steampunk–ish. When we were there, the trains were full of locals doing their thing, and tourists like us taking a nutty number of photos.
So, given this monorail has been in service for more than a century, and is clearly good at what it does, why are there so few other monorails about? Look at the fourth photo in this set. You see that big steel bar on the left? It has to be moved across to the right to replace the current curve of the monorail track, by some humungous machinery above it. This construction is a single set of points.
If I were ever to be asked to organise a steampunk festival, I now know exactly where it would be held.