Alwegbahn

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Alwegbahn in Kuala Lumpur
Turin monorail

Alwegbahn is the name of a standing monorail high-speed railway design. Preliminary work for this had already been carried out in Hamburg in the 1940s . With financial support from the initiator and Swedish Multimillionärs A xel L ennart We nner- G ren was after the establishment of the Federal Republic in Cologne - Fühlingen a sensational test track under the direction of the German Railway Engineers Josef Hinsken and Georg constructed Holzer. Implementation in the German-speaking area never came about despite high expectations, with the exception of the panorama train . A few individual routes were implemented primarily in the Asia-Pacific region. Its use in individual Disney parks became particularly well known.

Technical concept

In the Alweg system, wagons with bogies are used as vehicles , which are equipped with twin-tire support wheels and guide wheels with pneumatic tires . The wagons sit on elevated chassis beams made of concrete or steel profiles and partially enclose the route. The mobile beams have a rectangular cross-section, which is often slightly indented at the side in the shape of an hourglass. After the first prototypes with diesel drive , an electric drive was later used. The power supply ( direct current ) is produced via a busbar that is painted on the side .

Alweg tracks in different versions and designs

Drive concept

Alwegbahn as future technology

During the first development phase of the Alweg monorail at the beginning of the 1950s, alternative drive concepts - in particular magnetic levitation technology based on the linear motor concept - were also discussed, but never got beyond a model status. Originally target areas adjacent to industrial railways and transport and the high speed - distance transport provided, the maximum speed should be h at 300 km /. The media stressed the sensational futuristic appearance and the high level of international interest in the “high-speed train of tomorrow”. Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard emphasized the German interest in technology leadership in this area on the occasion of a tour . A commitment by the federal government was later ruled out due to the lack of export prospects, so that a German reference plant never came into being.

Technical advantages over wheel-rail

Derailment of the Alwegbahn despite a collision in Seattle

The Alweg manufacturers highlighted the following advantages over traditional wheel-rail systems:

  • the increased safety (collision, derailment )
  • the possibility of automatic train control
  • the clearly space-saving routing with tighter curve radii on elevated elevated railway lines, also roughly parallel to existing motorways
  • the lower energy consumption due to the closely conformal to the driving carrier vehicle and better aerodynamic profile
  • the possibility of reaching speeds of up to 300 km / h through new drive concepts

Planned and implemented applications

The talks included longer routes in Brazil , South Africa , a European cross-connection from Hamburg to Madrid , some local transport routes as well as an airport shuttle in Munich and city connections in Switzerland and the Ruhr area .

Trial version and technical implementation

Alwegbahn track

A working model of the Alwegbahn was built in 1952 in Cologne-Fühlingen on a scale of 1: 2.5. On October 6, 1952, a public test drive was carried out on a route in the Fühlinger Heide. The Alwegbahn travels on a concrete beam and partially encompasses the track (" saddle track "). As a result, their rubber wheels roll on three sides of the road : carrying wheels on the top, guide wheels on the side. The test track initially reached speeds of 80 km / h, later 180 km / h. In 1957, a 1.6 km long test track was built on a 1: 1 scale at the same location, including the necessary operational buildings. It was operated with vehicles until 1967 and then dismantled.

Projects and studies

The Frankfurt Alwegnetz from 1959, which was never realized

There was also interest and considerations for long-distance transport projects in Brazil, South Africa, in the British colonial empire and in Great Britain and Canada, as well as in urban transport in London, Vienna, Sao Paulo, Cologne, Hamburg, Leverkusen and Frankfurt.

In 1959, an all-way system with two lines was initially proposed for local transport in Frankfurt am Main . As part of a comparative study in which the Alweg system was to be compared with an underground and underground railway network, the network proposal was expanded to five lines in 1961. However, since the city administration favored a system that could be implemented step by step, it was decided to build a subway using the existing tram infrastructure .

At the end of the 1960s, plans for a north-south route in Jena / GDR , for which technology would have had to be imported from the Federal Republic , were just as advanced . Due to a directive to “ clear interference from the west ”, this import would no longer have been possible, so that the plans had to be abandoned in 1971. Nevertheless, the planned routes for the Alwegbahn were kept free in the new building area Lobeda ; today trams run there.

In other cities in Europe, too, there were Alweg projects that were not implemented. From 1958 an Alwegbahn on the Gürtel and above Mariahilfer Strasse was under discussion for Vienna , which should replace the Viennese electric light rail (see Vienna Alwegbahn plans ). Regardless of the fact that the powerful financial advisor and later mayor Felix Slavik favored the system, the decision was made here to build an underground train that was more expensive but more gentle on the cityscape . In Turin , Italy , for the Italia '61 exhibition in 1961, an approximately one-kilometer route was built through the exhibition grounds along the Corso Unità d'Italia expressway . It began at a southern station in what is now the Giardino Corpo Italiano di Liberazione park , where it crossed an artificial lake and extended to the northern terminus at Piazzale Fratelli Ceirano . A short section of the driveway in the park and the northern terminus have been preserved to this day, while the northern station and storage hall have been converted into Casa UGI , a non-profit institution for children with cancer .

For financial reasons and because of more promising projects, the technical implementation was limited to a few uses in local transport. For these projects, too, only the Cologne test route was built in Germany; the promising route Cologne - Leverkusen - Opladen never came about , contrary to the will of Max Adenauer , son of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and then Cologne City Director, and despite a positive decision by the Cologne City Council. Alweg AG's offer to pre-finance the route in the form of an early PPP did not materialize either. The cause was a lack of commitment or budget disputes in the federal system as well as the negative attitude of the industry ( Bayer- Leverkusen), which preferred the expansion of the railway lines .

Exports to overseas and Asia, technology continuation

The first Alweg application was a visitor train in Disneyland , further references came about especially in Asia and overseas. The Alwegbahn concept was used most in Japan. A license agreement for the system was signed by the Krupp company (owner of Alweg after the death of Wenner-Gren) with Hitachi and the Disney Company (further developed by Bombardier Transportation ). Hitachi built several Asian Alwegbahnen, including in Tokyo to Haneda Airport ( Tōkyō Monorail ), in Osaka and Singapore . In the city of Seattle in the USA, an all-way railway has been connecting downtown with the exhibition grounds since the 1962 World's Fair. Alwegbahnen were also built at trade fairs and in amusement parks , such as the EP-Express in Europa-Park. The newest Alwegbahn is the Daegu Monorail (Line 3 of the Daegu Metro ) in South Korea, which went into operation on April 23, 2015.

Causes for the lack of acceptance

Former Stazione Nord of the Alwegbahn in Turin in 2004 (before it was converted into Casa UGI )

The Alweg was a zeitgeist formative , futuristic system, wrought in the 1950s and 1960s, a great sensation. The reasons for the low level of implementation in some smaller projects (e.g. in Turin, the Kuala Lumpur Monorail and Sydney Monorail ) were due to the lack of acceptance of the massive interventions in the cityscape and cultural landscape and the insufficient compatibility with traditional rail transport.

In addition, the concept was not tailored to the parallel automobile motorization and the expansion of air traffic . The use of tires on a concrete carrier led to wear problems during operation, but at Métro Paris the pneumatic tires are characterized by lower maintenance costs compared to conventional vehicles. Due to the greater running resistance, the energy requirement is also higher than with double-rail systems. In addition, the journey on the pilot route was significantly more bumpy than with normal rail traffic.

The main disadvantage compared to two-rail systems is the switch function. In the case of saddle railways whose vehicles encompass the route, switches are only possible in the form of drag switches . With these, the blunt driving on an incorrectly positioned turnout, which with a tongue turnout only causes a collision process associated with comparatively minor consequences, always leads to derailment and, if the route is elevated, to a fall. In addition, turnouts for saddle railways require changeover times of between ten and twenty seconds. As a result, the route formation and change times increase to values ​​that are unacceptable, especially for heavily loaded inner-city rapid transit systems with frequent trains. An all-way railway system would have to be operated as straight-line as possible from the start, and shortened repeater trains are also problematic because they are set off in sweeping systems.

In addition, because of the running gear parts protruding into the passenger compartment, it was not possible to have continuously flat car floors, and the necessary platforms in an unfavorable position in the middle of the car hindered the distribution of passengers. In the case of railways built later, the floor of the car was raised in some cases in order to make the passenger compartments level and free of fixtures possible again. In the case of elevated routes without an accompanying escape route, it is difficult to provide assistance from outside in the event of a fault or emergency and it is hardly possible for vehicle occupants to rescue themselves; in any case it requires additional vehicle equipment to be carried.

literature

  • Jens Krakies, Frank Nagel: Stadtbahn Frankfurt am Main: A Documentation . 2nd Edition. Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-923907-03-6 . (Standard work sources on the subway and its building history, but without naming sources), pp. 23-25
  • Reinhard Krischer: Alweg-Bahn - technology, history and future of the legendary monorail . Transpress, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-613-71209-1

Web links

Commons : ALWEG  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ private page to the Alwegbahn
  2. ↑ Alweg Torino 2004. Retrieved on October 3, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Google Maps. Retrieved October 3, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Chi siamo. Retrieved October 3, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Daegu Urban Railway Line 3