Hello and Guten Tag!
It’s June 2019 and I’m at Dusseldorf Airport
where I’m about to fly back to London because this is the past.
Er yes, before we start, quick disclaimer:
this is old footage from back in the days when Corona was just a popular Mexican beer brand
and that does also mean it’s before I bought any fancy stabilising equipment for my camera
so, sorry about that.
Anyway, as I get to the airport
I receive an alert telling me that my flight has been delayed by two hours.
Sigh.
What am I going to do at Dusseldorf Airport for two hours?
*Music: Entry of the Gladiators by Julius Fučík*
This is the Dusseldorf Airport Skytrain,
a shiny silver suspended monorail straight out of science fiction,
but it’s real
and since 2002 it’s been carrying passengers the two and a half kilometres
from Dusseldorf Airport Railway Station
to Dusseldorf Airport Airport.
It is one of only a handful of suspended railways on the planet,
as you’ll have noticed if you’ve been anywhere,
but hang on
- that’s pretty much exactly what I said 3 years ago
about the one just down the road in Wuppertal.
"It's also one of the world's only suspension railways,
as you will have noticed if you've been anywhere."
So in a world where most countries don’t have any suspended railways,
how did Germany end up with two of them?
Er, sorry. Three of them.
Four??
Wow.
Someone should make a YouTube series about those.
It all starts in 1901,
when German engineer Karl Eugen Langen invents the suspended railway
and begins what was (relatively speaking)
a golden age of dangly monorail manufacturing mania.
The historic system in Wuppertal opens in March that year,
quickly followed by its little hill-climbing cousin in Dresden later that spring, and...
...that’s basically it.
Everyone else just builds trams, metros, and conventional trains.
But although the world moves on, the idea is never completely forgotten.
In 1929 a Scottish inventor called George Bennie designs what he calls a "Railplane",
using a similar principle, albeit with an extra rail underneath for stabilisation
and extra propellers so it could go fast.
He even got as far as building this
and running it along a short test track just outside Glasgow,
but before you all rush out and buy tickets to Scotland
sadly it’s not there any more;
no-one bought the idea,
Bennie ended up bankrupting himself,
and it was all torn down and sold for scrap in the 1940s.
These days all that’s left of it is this small blue plaque.
But happily the story of suspended railways doesn’t end there,
as you might be able to tell by the fact that we’re currently on one.
The idea still had potential,
it just needed someone to come up with a way of making it work.
In the end there was only one country
who could take something as mad as this,
and make it economical, efficient, and reliable,
and that country was,
of course…
France.
In 1959 a consortium called SAFEGE,
made up of 25 big French companies including Michelin and Renault,
or for French viewers, *French pronunciation* Michelin and Renault,
unveil an experimental new type of suspended railway
on a test track 100km south of Paris,
and it’s completely different to anything anyone had seen before.
For context, in Wuppertal the wheels of the train run along a metal rail on the top of the girder
– it’s actually quite conventional, apart from the bit about where the rest of the train is -
but in the SAFEGE system the wheels have rubber tyres
like those you might have seen on some lines of the Paris metro
and they run on laminated wooden tracks
all of which is encased inside the girder.
So if you want to be pedantic about it,
and let’s be clear we absolutely do,
that raises the question: is it actually a monorail?
Is it even a railway?
I’ll let you enjoy debating that in the comments.
Fundamentally, though, it’s the casing that makes a big difference,
because it means all the moving parts of the vehicle are protected from the elements,
along with the electric third rail that supplies the power,
and all the various wires and cables.
This drastically reduces the need for any maintenance and cleaning,
and therefore makes the whole thing more economical, more efficient, and more reliable.
And back here in Dusseldorf you can see the Skytrain is the SAFEGE system,
or at least a slightly refined version of it with a more lightweight construction,
it was built 40 years later after all.
And this is not the only one like it:
SAFEGE had got something they could sell,
and combined with the kind of financial backing that George Bennie could only have dreamed of,
they started the second Golden Age (relatively speaking) of suspended railways.
The first people to buy the idea were Mitsubishi,
who go on to build three systems in Japan,
(one of which admittedly has now gone)
and they were followed by Siemens,
who build three systems in Germany,
(one of which admittedly has now gone).
Plans for Manchester and San Francisco fell through
and they never made any in France
but the 4 current lines
– this one, Dortmund, and the 2 in Japan –
are enough for SAFEGE systems to be,
as Wikipedia beautifully puts it,
the leading type of suspended railway currently in transit use.
So why do these keep getting built in Germany?
Well, it’s probably not a coincidence that both Dusseldorf and Dortmund
are within 50km of the grandaddy in Wuppertal:
it’s a local thing, there’s some history and maybe even some regional pride involved.
Even so I don’t think you’d ever call a dangletrain the obvious solution
but you can see why Dusseldorf Airport chose to build one;
they wanted something that would take away congestion from ground level,
well this does that much better than a tram or a bus would;
it had to fit into an already very crowded space,
well this is so lightweight it takes up barely more ground space than a row of streetlights;
and it would have to negotiate some tight corners,
well it might not be immediately obvious why,
but it’s more comfortable for you to go round a corner on a dangletrain
than almost any other type of transport.
That’s because when this goes round a corner it swings out at the bottom,
while a conventional vehicle swings out from the top.
Whether you’re turning left or right, t
his means passengers are automatically leaning into the corner instead away from it,
giving everyone a more comfortable ride
and therefore allowing you to take corners at a higher speed.
And last and possibly not least: let's face it,
it just looks cool.
So there we go:
the reason Germany has so many suspended railways
(and when I say "so many", i mean "four")
is partly because it’s a German invention,
partly because of the laws of physics,
partly because of France,
and partly because why not.
I hope that clears everything up.
If you’d like to ride the Dusseldorf Airport Skytrain,
you can just come here and buy a ticket,
but you probably won’t need to because it’ll be included your train ticket,
your car parking ticket,
and on some airlines maybe even your plane ticket.
The system is designed to be accessible
and the airport has wheelchairs available free of charge if you need one.
Btw Dusseldorf is a great airport to fly into if you want to visit Wuppertal as well.
In fact if anyone from the regional tourist board is watching
I’ve designed this poster for you
so please get in touch and we can arrange my fee.
To everyone else,
thank you very much for watching,
and I will see you soon.