Alweg was a transportation company based in Germany known for pioneering straddle-beam

monorail A monorail is a Rail transport, railway in which the track consists of a single rail or beam. Colloquially, the term "monorail" is often used to describe any form of elevated rail or people mover. More accurately, the term refers to the style ...

History

Alweg was founded by Swedish industrial magnate Dr. Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren in January 1953 as Alweg-Forschung, GmbH (Alweg Research Corporation), based in Fühlingen, a suburb of

Cologne Cologne ( ; ; ) is the largest city of the States of Germany, German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with nearly 1.1 million inhabitants in the city pr ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

. The company was an outgrowth of the Verkehrsbahn-Studiengesellschaft (Transit Railway Study Group), which had already presented its first monorail designs and prototypes in the previous year. The Alweg name is an

acronym An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each wor ...

derived from Dr. Wenner-Gren's full name. Alweg is best remembered for their role in building the original

Disneyland Monorail System The Disneyland Monorail (originally named the Disneyland Alweg Monorail System) is an attraction and transportation line at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, United States. It was the first daily operating monorail in the world. Hi ...

Disneyland Disneyland is a amusement park, theme park at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California. It was the first theme park opened by the Walt Disney Company and the only one designed and constructed under the direct supervision of Walt Disney, ...

, which opened in 1959, and the

Seattle Center Monorail The Seattle Center Monorail is an elevated railway, elevated straddle-beam monorail line in Seattle, Washington, United States. The monorail runs along 5th Avenue between the Seattle Center and Westlake Center in Downtown Seattle, making n ...

, which opened for the 1962 Century 21 Exposition. Both systems remain operational, with the

Seattle Center The Seattle Center is an entertainment, education, tourism and performing arts center located in the Lower Queen Anne, Seattle, Lower Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States. Constructed for the Century 21 Exposition, 1962 W ...

Monorail still using the original Alweg trains which have traveled over one million miles. A third system, built in

Turin Turin ( , ; ; , then ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The city is main ...

for the Italia 61 exposition remained unused a few months after the exposition closed and was destroyed by a fire in the late 1970s, most probably set by vandals. The remnants of the system were scrapped in 1981, with the north station repurposed as an office building. In 1963, Alweg put forward a proposal to the

Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors (LACBOS) is the five-member Board of Supervisors, governing body of Los Angeles County, California, United States. History On April 1, 1850 the citizens of Los Angeles elected a three-man Court of Se ...

for a monorail system that would be designed, built, operated and maintained within

Los Angeles County, California Los Angeles County, officially the County of Los Angeles and sometimes abbreviated as LA County, is the List of United States counties and county equivalents, most populous county in the United States, with 9,663,345 residents estimated in 202 ...

by Alweg. Alweg promised to take all

financial risk Financial risk is any of various types of risk associated with financing, including financial transactions that include company loans in risk of default. Often it is understood to include only downside risk, meaning the potential for financi ...

for the construction with the cost of the system to be recovered through fares collected. The supervisors voted down the proposal, mostly due to political pressures from

Standard Oil of California Chevron Corporation is an American multinational List of oil exploration and production companies, energy corporation predominantly specializing in Petroleum industry, oil and gas. The second-largest Successors of Standard Oil, direct descenda ...

and

General Motors General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. The company is most known for owning and manufacturing f ...

, which were strong advocates for

automobile dependency Car dependency is a pattern in urban planning that occurs when infrastructure favors automobiles over other modes of transport, such as public transport, bicycles, and walking. Car dependency is associated with higher transport pollution than tr ...

. This move was greatly resented by famed author

Ray Bradbury Ray Douglas Bradbury ( ; August 22, 1920June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, Horror fiction, horr ...

who supported the monorail project and resented the later move to build a subway in Los Angeles.Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars (c.2005) for essay entitled: "L.A., We ''Are'' the World! A New Millennium Revelation"(1989) Alweg's technology was licensed in 1960 by Hitachi Monorail, which continues to construct monorails based on Alweg technology around the world. What was for decades the world's busiest monorail line, the

Tokyo Monorail The , officially the , is a straddle-beam, Alweg-type monorail line in Tokyo, Japan. It is an airport rail link that connects Haneda Airport, Tokyo International Airport (Haneda) to Tokyo's Ōta, Tokyo, Ōta, Shinagawa, and Minato, Tokyo, Minato ...

, was completed in 1964 by what was then the Hitachi-Alweg division of Hitachi, and today's busiest monorail system, Chongqing Rail Transit, is also based on Alweg and Hitachi technology. After Alweg ran into financial difficulties, Alweg's German operations were taken over by

Krupp Friedrich Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp (formerly Fried. Krupp AG and Friedrich Krupp GmbH), trade name, trading as Krupp, was the largest company in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century as well as Germany's premier weapons manufacturer dur ...

. Krupp wound up all Alweg operations by 1964. In the 1960s there was a plan to build an Alweg monorail in the

High Tatras The High Tatras or High Tatra Mountains (; ; ,'' Vysoki Tatry''; ; ), are a mountain range along the border of northern Slovakia in the Prešov Region, and southern Poland in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship. They are a range of the Tatra Mountains ...

in Slovakia.

References

External links

{{Commons category, ALWEG
Los Angeles monorail proposal (The Monorail Society)
ALWEG Vehicle manufacturing companies established in 1953 Manufacturing companies based in Cologne Defunct companies of Germany Monorail companies Science and technology in Sweden 1953 establishments in West Germany Vehicle manufacturing companies disestablished in 1964 1964 disestablishments in West Germany

History

See also

References

External links