#arrowhead park

Houston, TX Used to Have A Monorail Line & Walt Disney Tried to Buy It

...well sort of...

I bet you didn’t know that Texans once toyed with the idea of having their own monorail line to help relieve some of their traffic headaches. And they were working on this all the way back in the 50′s. They even built it themselves.

A Houston group (led by Weldon Appelt, PE) designed and built a prototype that attracted a lot of attention. So much so that they were quickly bought by Swedish industrialist Dr. Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren - who at the time was one of the world’s richest men - think Elon Musk level loaded.

They installed a test track in Arrowhead Park in 1956 and ran a demonstration that only lasted for 8 months, but thousands of people visited the installation and rode the monorail while it was open.

After this it was moved to Dallas where it ran between the Cotton Bowl and the State Fair Grounds. It ran like this for 8 years and was then torn down when carnival operators pressured the powers-that-be. They complained that “tens of thousands of people came to ride the Monorail for free and not their carnival rides.”

But during its run, the monorail line had attracted the attention of Walt Disney himself. He was in the process of researching monorail systems in order to find the right one for his new theme park, Disneyland.

The Houston group that developed the Trailblazer turned their nose up at Disney though. Walt wanted them to install it at Disneyland for free and would only buy it after 1 year of successful operation. He wanted them to demonstrate that their system could hold up to the demands and volume of guests that Disneyland would put on the Houston monorail line before he bought it.

Plus the advertising would have been great for them...

But they said no.

So Dr. Axel Wenner-Gren decided he’d work with Walt and hooked him up with his newly ‘improved’ ALWEG system and the rest is history.

More Info on the ‘Trailblazer’ Monorail line:

A Brief History of the Skyway Monorail

Houston Architecture Forum Discussion Thread

BTW the Trailblazer is now a house in Wills Point, TX

Yes, seriously - it’s a house now

The Trailblazer’s Wikipedia Entry