After spending more than $2.6 trillion developing a new monorail for Disneyland, the super-modernistic vehicle is going to be sent to the scrap heap after traveling less than twelve feet on the park’s elevated track.
“The darned thing is just too wide,” says Monorail engineer Buzz Steamless on condition of anonymity. “It couldn’t even make it around the smallest turn without scraping against something. ” Speculation is that the new vehicles’ copious new features (including padded leather seating, interactive track lighting, lifeboats in case of a water landing, and a dining car) could not be contained within a standard-size vehicle, or that insisting that the entire monorail be hand crafted made it impossible for exacting building standards to be maintained.
Whatever the reason, and whomever the blame may fall on, the fact is that Disneyland will be one monorail short when the busy summer vacation season rolls around. Says Steamless, “We haven’t decided yet what we’re going to do about this. Either we’re going to just cram the things full and hope that the fire department looks the other way, or break out one of the old, horse-drawn monorails from when the park opened.”