Posted: Feb 17, 2020 6:31 pm
The Schwebebahn was built to fill an existing need in Germany's densely populated heavy industry centre, and it actually goes somewhere. About 80,000 tickets are sold every workday. Sydney's monorail loop went nowhere.
It was Sir Peter Abeles's brainfart. Abeles had come from Hungary with a few shekels in his pocket and became a billionaire after he founded what developed into the global logistics conglomerate, TNT. Although TNT had suffered some serious problems at the time, he thought he could do no wrong, and the people that mattered agreed. He based the project on no more than the hope that if you build it, they will come, "they" being tourists and people who wanted to get from one part of the CBD to another. They did not. The bus loop was stopped to "encourage" the use of the monorail, but the underground city rail loop remained. By the time rolling stock had reached the end of its service life, TNT had already offloaded the elephant to Veolia. Veolia decided it had better things to do with its money. Instead of replacing the train it scrapped the lot.
It was Sir Peter Abeles's brainfart. Abeles had come from Hungary with a few shekels in his pocket and became a billionaire after he founded what developed into the global logistics conglomerate, TNT. Although TNT had suffered some serious problems at the time, he thought he could do no wrong, and the people that mattered agreed. He based the project on no more than the hope that if you build it, they will come, "they" being tourists and people who wanted to get from one part of the CBD to another. They did not. The bus loop was stopped to "encourage" the use of the monorail, but the underground city rail loop remained. By the time rolling stock had reached the end of its service life, TNT had already offloaded the elephant to Veolia. Veolia decided it had better things to do with its money. Instead of replacing the train it scrapped the lot.