Winter Monorail!

A quick visit to the monorail in the winter. Not much to say here really!

 

The media has discovered my monorail!

My monorail cabin project is apparently trending online! It all started when the Pioneer Press’ summer intern found this site, and published an article in the local paper:

Whatever happened to the Minnesota Zoo monorail cars? A St. Paul guy turned some into cabins.

From there, it got picked up by car website Jalopnik:

https://jalopnik.com/meet-the-guy-who-bought-a-monorail-for-1-000-1835842056

And then the Weather Channel. Really? The Weather Channel? I even had to ask the reporter who called me, what? really? Apparently, yes, really.

https://weather.com/news/news/2019-06-26-minnesota-zoo-monorail-cabins

And so it goes!

I’ve put up a quick Youtube video with a few more details and some video of moving the monorail! If you’d like to support this site and my silly projects, please subscribe to my channel! This is my first *ahem* “real” youtube vid aside from some old junk from college and un-narrated randomness, so I apologize for all the “ums” and “uhs”. If I keep doing this, it might get better…

Monorail Museum Updates

I’ve added some “artifacts” to my miniature monorail museum, located in the head car of the former MN Zoo Monorail that I bought a couple years ago.

While I’m trying to keep the monorail mostly original, that big hulking power box in the back of the driver’s cab was just begging to be turned into a display case. A little dremel work and a plexiglass window and it’s much nicer than before! Plus the mice don’t chew on my toy trains now! (Keeping mice out of this thing might be impossible, it even came with some free zoo mice when I first got it 😛 )

The Baron, as a former monorail driver, has moved up to my upper shelf of MN Zoo-related memorabilia. The lower shelf is more general monorail “stuff”, since people keep giving me monorail toys and whatnot that they come across. In addition to the obvious Disney monorail, I managed to find an HO scale Von Roll MkIII model that’s pretty darn close to this one! The MkIII was in the same family as the zoo’s UMI Tourister, just a little more developed and streamlined.

The wall displays document monorail tech, MN zoo history, and other monorail-related tidbits.

And outside the monorail I’ve stuck a “historic marker” for random visitors. Although the train is on private property and not open to the public, we do get some friends and acquaintances stopping by who are curious about it!

 

Further Monorail Remodeling

Here are a few more updates and photos of the monorail!

The station platform and new steps:

And some winter views:

And a few more concept renderings:

On a sadder note, I recently learned that Kim Pedersen has passed away. Kim founded the Monorail Society and authored a great book on the history and technology of monorail trains. He will be truly missed.

SONY DSC

 

Monorail Remodeling

Below are some aerial photos of the monorail showing our “station” (deck) platform started, and the very scenic rural setting between farms and forest:

Aerial photos are courtesy of Tim Walgrave.

Below is a newer floorplan render, showing potential layouts for two cars. This version includes a “sleeping”/”living room”/”office” car and a “kitchen”/”dining”/”guest” car. My improvements will mostly be drop-in modules that don’t permanently alter the car interiors. I have a few friends using the other cars and designing their own interesting interiors!

A close-up of the main control panel, featuring some more museum displays and a Baron von Raschke action figure (after his professional wrestling career, the Baron drove the monorail at the zoo). If any of my readers have photos or artifacts they’d like to share in this small and very unofficial museum, please let me know!

We also have a projector screen that can be set up for monorail movie nights!

More to come as I continue working on this!

Monorails to New York

After I purchased a monorail train from the Minnesota Zoo, I was contacted by some folks from New York who plan to start a monorail museum. As I had apparently become an “expert” at getting 1970s monorail cars onto trailers, they asked me to help with the loading process once they purchased the remaining cars.

With larger commercial vehicles and powered winches available, the move went a lot faster! We were able to get 4 cars per load on two trailers.

We moved out all 11 remaining cars in three loads this way. On the final trip they also picked up some wheel bogies to add to the museum display.

The service barn looks very empty now with no trains parked inside!

Kim Pedersen with the Monorail Society was instrumental in connecting me with the museum people. You can check out Kim’s new book here (it’s great, especially for reading while in a monorail!)

More Monorail Extras

Recently I happened across the estate sale of a former MN Zoo employee. I was able to pick up a number of old zoo shirts ranging from the 1980s to more recently. A few of these have a neat little “Conservation” montage of zoo animals and the monorail:

There were also quite a few issues of Minnesota Zoo Magazine from the 1980s. A few of them had monorail-related pieces, including a neat shot of the snowplow in action.

And we even found a monorail ticket from 2008! (Two-sided scan below)

Some of these will probably end up in my mini-museum in the monorail cab.

Monorail Phenology

While cleaning out my monorail cars I came across a few interesting documents. Several notebooks marked “Phenology” describe local wildlife seen along the monorail track. Phenology is defined as “the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena, especially in relation to climate and plant and animal life”. An article from 1979 explains these notebooks:

“The operator/tour guides keep their eyes open and when a phenlolgical event is spotted, they record this observation, its date and location in a phenology logbook kept by the stationmaster. This data is summarized each day on a report board in the station for all the MZG’s public to see.” (from MZG Newsletter, Minnesota State Zoological Board, 1979)

For those interested in reading these notebooks, I’ve scanned and uploaded PDFs here. There are a few torn and missing pages, so these are not 100% complete. There is also some water damage and fading from sitting in the train for a few years, some pages are hard to make out.

Phenology – Train 2 (Covers the period of 8/15/2001 to 8/30/2013)

Phenology – Train 3 (Covers approximately 7/4/2008 to 6/19/2012)

Also found in the monorail were several info sheets on various zoo animals seen along the route. These are probably cheat-sheets for the operator / guide staff to describe what passengers would see along the way.

I’ve also made a PDF of those sheets for archival purposes, available below.

Animal Info Sheets from Driver’s Cab

Monorail Extras

Work is gradually progressing on the monorail train, which has proven to be a wonderful place to camp out! As we work on remodeling and fixing up the train I will have more posts with photos and progress reports, but for now here are a few monorail-related odds and ends. First is a 1979 T-shirt design I came across:

And a 1984 postcard of the monorail in operation:

And some original monorail fare tokens from the zoo:

I’ve made a few custom bumper stickers:

And here are a few more photos of the train’s origin, in case anyone is curious what the zoo side of things looks like. Some of these facilities might not be around much longer.

The abandoned MN Zoo monorail station (soon to become a new animal attraction):

Some pictures of the abandoned monorail track:

In the maintenance barn with two trains parked inside:

Some close-ups of how a monorail bogie mounts to a car (normally this would be hidden between two cars, but one car has been de-coupled):

  

And a close-up of the transition from maintenance track (two rails for caster wheels) to monorail track (center beam for tires):

The remaining monorail cars from the zoo are destined for an East Coast museum.

 

 

 

 

 

Monorail Part II

As previously mentioned, I’ve purchased a retired monorail train from the Minnesota zoo. This follow-up documents some of the steps involved in moving a 100-ft long, 6-car monorail train from one place to another. All 6 cars are now in their new home in the countryside, the train makes a terrific weekend cabin and a very unique conversation piece!

The original weight was in the neighborhood of 27 tons (numbers vary depending on the source consulted, and few documents agree). We were able to lose quite a bit of weight by removing the wheel bogies and drive motors, which was also required for uncoupling and removal from the track.

For those interested, here are some of the bogies removed from the train. One is powered (with the large motor on top), and one is an unpowered idler:

The zoo was able to uncouple each car and move it on a maintenance track – actually two rails that support small casters under the cars. These originally allowed access to the underside of the train in an inspection pit.

For loading, we backed a trailer up to extensions of these maintenance rails, and winched each car onto the trailer using a cable puller or “come-along”.

Photo by Megan Emerson

 

Loading each car was about a 3-hour process, requiring occasional adjustments and stops to bridge various gaps in the rolling surface. After getting each car secured to the trailer, we drove them to their new home.

Quite a few unfortunate drivers can now say they’ve been stuck in traffic behind a monorail. The open ends of middle cars act like huge fiberglass air scoops and make for slow progress. I was able to take back roads for the journey, but you know you’re slow when a loaded cement truck passes you going uphill.

I had originally hoped to unload these by hand, using some redneck technology (a platform to roll them onto, and a series of jacks and blocks to lower them to the ground). Some friends pulled an all-nighter doing materials strength calculations and modeling possible methods, and convinced me this was even less safe than it sounded.

Instead, I hired a crane to do the hard part. Wieser Concrete has been amazingly helpful with this project, going above and beyond what we had hoped. I would highly recommend Wieser for anyone needing crane service in Wisconsin!

We tried various rigs for lifting these. The arrangement shown below was the first setup, strapping around the car with wood spreaders at the top to prevent crushing:

For the rest of the cars we used a much simpler and more stable lifting rig, with chains run down the ends to the steel frame. Most of the weight is in the bottom of the cars, the rest is mainly fiberglass.

After unloading from the trailer, we parked the monorail cars in a line so they formed a full 6-car train again. Below is an aerial view of one of the cars being moved into position:

Photo by Tim Walgrave

The crane was able to place these very precisely, so we could nest them together as designed. We had assumed that fine adjustments would need more jacks and rollers, but an expert crane operator who can save hours of manual labor is well worth it!

Each car is fairly self contained, much like a small camper or RV. They have small hatches allowing access to the interstitial space and crawling passage between cars if desired. We may add bunks or other changes down the road, although I’m still planning to make as few major modifications as possible to preserve the original vehicles.

I’ve even started a very small museum of sorts in the driver’s cab, with a few historic photos and artifacts related to the monorail. And of course, no monorail would be complete without a Simpsons reference!