The System

Walt Disney World has over 13 miles of monorail beam. The spur line to the monorail shop behind the Magic Kingdom where the monorails are maintained and repaired is 0.7 of a mile long. The Epcot beam is 7.4 miles long. The dual loop around the Seven Seas Lagoon is 2.8 miles in circumference.

The 12 Mark VI monorail trains have been in operation since 1989. The newest one came online in 1991. The original Walt Disney World monorails came online in 1971 and were the Mark IV monorails. The Mark VI Monorail was built by Bombardier of Canada. The original Mark IV was built by Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin, at its plant in Orlando near International Drive.

The maximum speed of a Mark VI monorail is 40 mph. The computer system prevents the train’s motors from accelerating faster than 40 mph. The drivers, however,  have been known to use gravity to increase the limit to near 50mph. That speed is still well within the design specification of near 70 mph.

Guests at the Walt Disney World Resort are allowed to ride in the front of the monorail with its driver. All that is required is to ask a monorail cast member. There is a limit of 4 people, and it does not matter if they can sit on each others laps. If they breathe, they count as a person.

The Mark VI monorails have a capacity of 364 guests: 60 in each car and 4 in the nose with the driver. Mark VI monorails ride on 12 load bearing tires produced by Michelin and Good Year. Each monorail also has 52 steering and guide tires located on the side of the beam as well as 60 nylon safety wheels. This is a total of 124 wheels per monorail, which is coincidentally the same number of metal handrails present on the monorail.

The monorails are powered from the aluminum and stainless steel bar that runs along side the beam. This electrified beam carries 600 Volts DC which is rectified from 13,200 Volts AC. The train takes this current and powers eight 113-HP DC motors.

Practicing for a Disaster

The monorails are impressively safe modes of transport, and there have been very few incidents involving the monorail system at Walt Disney World since it commenced operation in 1971. Still, because of the number of people that ride the monorails daily and because any such incident would by definition involve an elevated rescue since the beams and cars are well above ground level, the Walt Disney World Company and the Reedy Creek Fire Department have plans for monorail-related incidents and practice scenarios on a regular basis. This is normal in emergency services, of course, since disaster drills of all types are very important in assuring that all of us in emergency services, i.e., medical, police, fire, and dispatchers, are prepared to deal with a real incident. Other drills include mass casualty incidents, tornado drills, airplane crashes, major structure fire with injuries, and HAZMAT incidents.

Monorail evacuation drills are conducted several times a year, and typically will involve several components of the World Company, e.g., Transportation, Security, Engineering, Custodial, Environmental, as well as components from the Reedy Creek Improvement District, including the fire department and Building & Safety.

A train will be stopped somewhere on one of the beams. Drills have taken place on the shop spur line, the Epcot spur line between the Express beam and the Epcot beam northeast of  TTC, and on the beam inside Epcot near Odyssey. The driver calls in an emergency, and the response scenario starts. The people on the train, monorail cast members who volunteer to participate, are removed from the train by the fire department just as they would be if the drill were a true incident and the cast members were guests. Some of the cast members on the train are assigned some kind of medical condition, making their extrication a bit more complicated and introducing the need for patient triage.

Some Real Incidents

Real incidents do occasionally occur, however. One night during the summer in 1985 a Mark IV monorail caught on fire. The back two cars were burned badly. The cars were occupied, but everyone got off of the train okay. The train was on the Epcot beam south of the Magic Kingdom toll plaza. As I understand it, there was a side tire failure and the fragments from that tire lodged in the skirts where they eventually caught fire. Now there are beam contact sensors that will indicate when a side tire blows and a heat detection system that alerts the driver before things can get too hot in critical areas.

Reportedly, the burned rail is still visible, though just barely, where the fire and melting plastic left its mark.

On August 13, 1996, electrical equipment on one of the monorails started smoking as it pulled into the Magic Kingdom monorail station around nine o’clock in the evening. There were 5 passengers and the driver onboard at the time. Two Disney employees were reportedly treated for minor injuries.

One evening in August 2001 a monorail was struck by lightening near the Magic Kingdom toll plaza and started to smoke. A cast member at the toll plaza called 9•1•1, and Reedy Creek Fire Department responded with a full first alarm for a monorail evacuation. The train wasn’t evacuated, however. The train was towed into the station to unload and then parked on the Epcot spur for the rest of the night. The train itself  wasn’t damaged and was in service the following day. Apparently, the lightening strike blew some breakers, burned a couple of collector shoes, and supposedly took out a little chunk of the concrete beam itself.

Lightening strikes to or near a monorail aren’t all that uncommon. This is, after all, Florida, where lightening is just a fact of life. It's very rare that a train itself actually gets struck. Usually a section of the beam near the train gets struck. The net effect is the same, however, in that it trips the breakers for that rectifier zone, and that stops the train.  The overhead lighting also goes out when the train loses power on the beam. It will also on occasion trip the breakers on the train itself, causing the footstep lights go out. Basically, if you are riding on a monorail and lightening strikes the beam nearby, you can expect to hear a loud boom, the train will stop, and sometimes the lights will go out. You’d be stuck for 15 minutes or so until a tractor can get out to tow the train to the nearest station.

A Couple of Images

The following pictures were taken at one of the rectifier piers backstage near the Grand Floridian.