The Disney World Monorail Disaster 2009 | Plainly Difficult Short Documentary

Disney World Florida is said to be the happiest place on earth, as long as you ignore the company's nastier aspects. You know, the sweatshops they use in China and Bangladesh, they are unpleasant working conditions for cast members in theme parks and the In fact, they laid off thousands of employees during the recent pandemic, that is, the worst time for become unemployed in recent history, especially for service industry workers, but kids love their TV shows and movies. Hell, even my own kids love Disney products, it's like eating donuts, we all know that. which are bad but damn they taste so good, I think I've gotten a bit off track here, excuse the pun, well personally one of my favorite parts of Disney World when I went there in the early 2000s It was the

monorail

, such a futuristic mode of transportation and to a very young John, I thought this must be the future of passenger travel, but I was a child and therefore an idiot.

There are huge disadvantages inherent to this method of transportation and they didn't even throw an elephant out of one. of their new age trains, there are much better videos on youtube explaining this, but you might be wondering why I'm going on a rant about Disney and

monorail

s. This is a channel dedicated to the folly of humanity in the form of its mistakes, after all. My captive slice of YouTube audience, the happiest place on earth, has not escaped its fair share of

disaster

s and one of them occurred in

2009

, about the very thing that a young John clearly admired so much when I went to Disney World and had so many desire to travel. in the front cabin, but unfortunately every time someone else arrived I had been beaten to it, but in hindsight, maybe this was a good thing, well, that's my introduction, let's get started, I'm John and you're seeing it clearly it's

difficult

, we're the years 1960. and a new Disney theme park is being planned.

The project began in 1959 initially as an extension of the already established Anaheim complex in California. It quickly became apparent that perhaps a completely blank slate would offer a unique opportunity to have complete control over the surrounding area. The park, the original Disneyland, had become somewhat surrounded by local businesses that were trading on the resort's popularity. Market research had shown that a location closer to the East Coast would serve the company well, and after looking for a location in Florida, the decision was made for now. I'm going to quickly go through the land acquisition part of Disney World, but it's very interesting and worth a look as Disney was very clever in the way they obtained all the space required.

Walt Disney was a bit of a transportation fanatic to put it lightly and as such, when the anaheim park was built, he managed to incorporate several methods of transportation, one of which was the monorail and it was a pet project of Disney's, as such, The new Florida Park would receive a similar treatment. Originally, the Florida site was intended to showcase a future city concept with futuristic rapid transit at the forefront, this was called the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow or Epcot. This would change after Walt Disney's death in 1966, but Epcot would open, but to a more watered-down version of the living, working city imagined in the park's early conceptual stages, but while not a futuristic experiment, the park would still I needed transportation to connect the hotel parking lots and the park itself.

This was accomplished through an intricate fleet of trackless trams and the monorail system when Disney World opened the monorail in October 1971. The system had four stops, expanded in October 1982 when Epcot opened. The final edition of the network was in 1988 with the Grand Floridian station. The system was electrified through the beam providing 600 volts through a bus bar. The monorail has a track length of 14.7 miles. Consisting of two routes on which three services operate to connect the route, switching beams are used and a branch line is used for access between the main line and the Epcot line. The trains used on the network were called Mark 6 and measured 62 meters or 203 feet 6 inches long and weighed 42 metric tons each, each train could carry up to 360 passengers now with a fairly complex network encompassing stops and various express services.

Effective train control is required and this is my favorite part of one of these videos. The monorail actually has a fairly sophisticated form of proprietary moving block signaling system called mapo. The system design was paid for with royalties from Mary Poppins, so it may be po, although the silly name is not a Mickey Mouse signaling system, the track or beam it is. They are divided into multiple sections which are around 500 feet, these form a block section and the transmitters in the beam transmit frequencies to the train, this will tell you the status of the track ahead, this is shown to the driver or pilot when Disney picks them up. calls on a screen. as a green signal meaning at least three blocks are clear, one yellow, two blocks are clear and one red, the next block is occupied if the train passes the red then the emergency brakes are applied which requires Having the driver use a system override button when used in this way works quite well.

If a driver receives a red more than twice in two years, then he is removed from his driver duties and is therefore managed quite a bit. fine, but sometimes it is necessary to override the system during operation, for example to go to the branch. Line to the maintenance building during a signal failure or for reverse movements. This last of these operations was a common way of working at the beginning and end of the work day. This is to run trains to and from maintenance facilities accessed via the express beam this is pretty straight forward for trains already on this beam but what about trains on the separate epcot beam ?

A switching beam is provided that requires trains to pass through the central ticket and transportation station and continue so that the rear of the train is clear of switch 9. Movement is under the authority of the central monorail coordinator via radio indicating the following normal visual to pylon 30 wait and notify because each pylon is numbered and identifiable trains can be moved in degraded working conditions avoiding the map although the initial movement towards the pylon free of the switch was carried out under the full protection of the system Signaling. Any following train would have to override the May system, as a train stopped at pylon 30 would still occupy the block section, which seems like a very dangerous situation to me. and this was the exact scenario that was about to unfold in the early hours of July 5,

2009

.

It's the end of a long day of operation for the Disney World monorail system. The parks remain open until approximately 11 p.m. like restaurants and dinners. The events provide entertainment for park visitors, as with any other transit system in the

world

. The operation continues well into the night and early morning, as visitors return to their cars, hotels or other public transportation, such as the pink, purple, silver, red and coral monorail. working on the system as ridership decreased, the system began to gradually shut down overnight. The express beam runs about an hour after the park closes, but the Epcot beam continues for the second round, allowing the express and resort monorails to stabilize. points before the epcot trains must make their reversing movements around 153 a.m. m., the central coordinator gave the authority to the pink monorail to maneuver to pylon 30 for its reverse movement, usually the coordinator worked from a building on the Epcot line side of the ticket center there.

They had switch position indicators and a CCTV feed, but due to staffing issues the role was being filled by a manager who had set up shop at a nearby restaurant using his phone to communicate and therefore had no access to the equipment. from the control room behind him. The coral monorails that still ran along the Epcot beam. The purple one had approximately six passengers on board and was headed to the ticket and transportation center because the pink one was in the stables section ahead. The purple one was instructed to override the mapo system to enter the station once the pink one had cleared. the switch beam the driver informed the central controller that he was free and waiting for further instructions the controller then contacted the workshop panel operator this person was responsible for power distribution and operation of the switch the actions the operator must take They consist of selecting the switch beam on the control panel cut off the power to the beam, command the alignment change and confirm the command and restore the power once the track is in the correct position.

If these actions are not performed in quick succession, the system times out, meaning the operator would have to restart the process, but this timeout would also cause the panel display to change windows and return to its normal window. The operator was in the process of setting the switch for the Pink Monorail when he received a radio call from the Silva Monorail. The driver was reporting a problem with his train when he entered the workshop, this prompted the operator to step away from the control panel to record this again in his log. Another radio call distracted the operator this time from the red monorail as he approached the maintenance facility and was requesting further instructions, the operator responded: Please wait outside the facility, this was at approximately 1:56 am, the operator returned to the panel that had already expired, thus returning the display window to the main display, the operator assumed that he had completed the switch alignment, traction currents were restored. and he radioed to central control that he had established the route for the pink monorail.

He was given a CCTV feed to seal a switch, but he was unable to verify that the switch had not actually moved and any reverse movement of the pink monorail would send it back. where the same person who pulled purple arrived at the station lobby. Sometimes the reverse movements made on the monorail were not requested by the central coordinator so that the driver changed ends or had a member of staff in the back cover as such when If the pink monorail was given the authority to reverse, the driver would not have had a visual view of the status of the switch.

Pink moved back as Purple entered the station seeing the impending collision. Purple's driver attempted to reverse, but Pink's rear cab slammed into Purple's front end, crushing the two together. The impact pushed both now crushed trains across the platform. The pink monorail driver felt and heard the collision. to move and upon realizing that he was not on the spare line he knew that another train was the source of the crash and the station noise personnel evacuated the passengers from the purple monorail and tried to rescue the driver, but he could not be seen. no sign of life

short

ly after the first emergency services arrived at the scene and the driver of the purple one was discovered dead. and the driver of the pink monorail were unharmed, the cost was thought to be more than $24 million in damages even though the system resides on private Disney property, investigators of any accident on the monorail came under scope of the ntsb as such investigation. was released and they would find some troubling operating rules for the Disney monorail in the subsequent report on the accident.

The ntsb found that Walt Disney World Resorts' procedures for the central coordinator did not specify that the central coordinator must observe for display in the concourse tower when the procedures for directing monorail movements also did not require the central coordinator to be on the concourse tower. esplanade tower. It was also found that when monorail movements were directed, it was at the discretion of the coordinator whether the train driver needed to change ends before reversing the movement, which was not frequently requested. Because it was faster to reverse the train, observing the movement of the switch on CCTV was not mandatory for the panel operator, other than making sure it was clear of the train before moving the switch, the operator even said in In an interview they said that they should just make sure that there is no train on that switch before moving it, the fault of the accident was due to three factors: one, the coordinator did not observe the movements and authorized the conductor in pink to reverse the train without changing end, two, the panel operator did not move the train. change and not verifyCCTV and finally Walt Disney World itself for their terrible safety practices that allowed all of these terrible operational decisions to become the standard way of working, the pink monorail operator was absolved of any blame due to the move The train to the station concourse and the branch line were virtually identical and it was concentrating on not going above 15 miles per hour, which would be a safety violation by overriding the Mapo system.

Disney World enacted multiple changes after the accident to ensure everyone was where they needed to be. in the case of switching beams, the driver in the correct cabin, the coordinator in the control room and the panel operator to confirm the movement of the switch. This accident is the reason why he can no longer enter the driver's cabin. the system became completely automatic. in 2014 the drivers still remain in the cab but train start control is now handled by platform staff which I think is a bit sad now, where would you rate this

disaster

on my disaster and legacy scales?

I'm going to say four and five, but maybe a four, if you don't mind riding in the driver's cab, all videos on the channel are creative commons attribution, share equally, the simple and

difficult

videos are produced by me, John, in a current sunny corner of the southern suburbs of London, UK, this canal is made. Made possible by my patreons and YouTube members who get early access to the videos. I would also like to thank my PayPal donors. They help the channel grow by liking, commenting and subscribing. Check out my Twitter for all kinds of photos as well as suggestions for the future. videos and all that's left to say is thanks for watching