[HN Gopher] Wuppertal's suspended monorail proved its doubters w...
___________________________________________________________________
Wuppertal's suspended monorail proved its doubters wrong [video]
Author : ohjeez
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-12-19 15:07 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| ordu wrote:
| So, it seems a falling elephant wouldn't splash if it splashed
| into the river.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| A reverence to areal event
| https://youtu.be/IrMNQP4sJnA?si=M13ENQoLMY5PTFyj
| itronitron wrote:
| you seem to have linked an Ad
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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(
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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!
| pixelpoet wrote:
| I love the Schwebebahn, and there's this funky song about it :D
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Ifi3wl550
| martin_a wrote:
| 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
| badgersnake wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| I wish we had more monorails and viaducts. They're useful, leave
| the ground infrastructure unimpeded, and are honestly beautiful
| to look at.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| 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?)
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| Maybe. Compare the Las Vegas Monorail with aerial sections of
| BART. But BART is heavy rail, with serious speed and
| capacity.
| martin_a wrote:
| 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.
| ttepasse wrote:
| 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 Dusseldorf
| 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
| asyx wrote:
| 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.
| namibj wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| dmkolobov wrote:
| 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.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yes the same as an airplane turning, you don't spill your
| coffee on a banked turn
| jerkstate wrote:
| so long as the turn is coordinated!
| https://pilotinstitute.com/turn-coordinator/
| slow_typist wrote:
| 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.
| porphyra wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.)
| whatever1 wrote:
| Yes let us buy more city buses. Have 10 ton beasts destroying
| the streets while carrying on average 5 people in the slowest
| and most delayedway imaginable.
| emchammer wrote:
| I don't think you meant for your comment to be so
| sarcastic. I live in the exurbs, not exactly the sticks,
| but on the outskirts of a major city and on the way to a
| significant medium-city city. I have seen pictures on
| English Russia, where there were catenary-powered tramways
| in what looked like Siberia in the 1950s or 1960s. I
| imagine how life would be here and now if there were two
| bus services at the nowhere stoplight near my house. One
| east-west, one north-south, running at convenient 15 minute
| intervals around the clock. It would be neat if there were
| a convenient ride to my workplace in the next city. I view
| riding the bus as having a chauffeur for $2.75. I saw some
| maps created by amateurs called Fantasy NYC Subway, where
| there were so many lines that they went up to double Greek
| letters. I have lived in NYC, and there is not even a one-
| seat train ride to the airport, nor always a taxi ride that
| does not have "trouble" with my debit card which goes away
| when I take a pic of his license. These monorails and
| suspended trains and such were done 100 years ago. People
| tried them. I have seen animes where the entire premise is
| about romance due to missed trains in nowhere places. For
| some reason none of these things happen in the United
| States.
|
| The picture I was thinking of is the second one down, after
| the advert: https://englishrussia.com/2019/01/18/nice-tram-
| photos-from-t...
| bluGill wrote:
| A bus with 5 people is already better than a car and they
| often hold many more people for part of the trip. what
| buses need is management that isn't there as a cushy reward
| for politics but instead there for trasit. A well run bus
| is the suburbs should be seeing 50-60 riders per hour off
| peak (most for 10 minutes) but when you run a but as poorly
| as many cities do it is no wonder nobody rides.
| Halian wrote:
| Needs more woopers. 'o'
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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?
| skrebbel wrote:
| Yes. It goes over the river.
| hohoho3688583 wrote:
| unspeakable
| croemer wrote:
| Lol, I first parsed the title as "the monorail _project_ having
| been suspended" (=halted)
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| 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 Ruhr, in my beat up Citroen (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 Citroen 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 Citroen, 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.
| pvorb wrote:
| 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
| czottmann wrote:
| The video contains a segment about Tuffi.
| dagurp wrote:
| This is an opportunity to use the world's least used emoji
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| 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
| whatsthatabout wrote:
| Seeing Wuppertal on the start-page of hackernews wasn't something
| on my bingo card lol
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| 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.
| eliaspro wrote:
| If you'd apply those kind of risk calculations to other means
| of transport, you should have a thousand more reasons to never
| ever get close to a car, yet taking a ride in one.
| cocodill wrote:
| Wuppertal's monorail is so phenomenal that it is much older than
| the city.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-12-22 23:02 UTC)