Why Disney Has a Monorail Problem
Today, I’m about to talk about why Disney has a monorail problem, and it’s not for any reason you might think.
Let’s talk about how a problem in Las Vegas hints at Disney’s future transportation decisions.
The Problem with Monorails
I’m a monorail evangelist.
When I’m at Walt Disney World, I’m doing everything I can to steer my group toward the monorail.
I stay at monorail resorts, and I love to dine on the monorail as well.
In fact, two of my favorite restaurants, Contempo Café and Chef Mickey’s, share the same floor with the security for the monorail station.
You can watch the monorail while you eat at these places, which is why I frequently choose them.
Why am I saying all this? I want you to understand how little I enjoy talking about the potential end of the monorail.
Is that an overly dramatic take? The answer is yes or no, depending on your perspective.
Less than a year ago, Bangkok, Thailand, added a new monorail system, an indicator that some still believe in the premise.
While Disney earns more of the monorail-related headlines, several other locations utilize this novel form of transportation.
By my count, 45 cities offer monorail services. So, you wouldn’t expect this industry to go away anytime soon, right?
Well, not so fast…
Financing monorail systems has proven one of the most pressing challenges of the applicable municipal areas.
In cities/regions where the monorails must pay for themselves, taxpayers usually end up footing the bill for revenue shortfalls.
Not coincidentally, the people in charge of those systems often struggle to pay for maintenance, much less new trams.
Monorails have proven to be a low-margin business, which is to say one that most companies avoid.
That reality leads us to a doomsday scenario unfolding in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Planned Obsolescence
You probably know that Las Vegas utilizes a monorail system to provide quick access for its millions of tourists.
What you may not know is that the
(LVMC) went broke.
I previously discussed this matter in September 2020. The Vegas monorail became one of the early victims of the pandemic.
LVMC already struggled to turn a profit before the pandemic. Then, it suddenly lost 90 percent of its customers overnight.
Since nobody knew how long the pandemic would last, LVMC filed for bankruptcy and pretty much quit the business.
Faced with no other good options, an unlikely entity purchased the monorail system to keep it afloat.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) bought the undesirable assets in bankruptcy court.
An aspect of this acquisition slipped beneath the cracks at the time, but it’s gaining headlines now.
In the LVCVA paperwork, it stated that the Vegas monorail would shut down for good no later than 2030 and possibly as soon as 2028.
I strongly suspect that the LVCVA would rather not take that extraordinary step, but circumstances are dictating the system’s fate.
Simply stated, monorails are such an obscure form of transportation that few vendors make them.
Even worse, there’s a degree of difficulty in finding a professional who can effectively maintain a monorail.
Even if that person can do the job, they’ll probably need parts.
Finding companies that sell such parts has become the greatest challenge of all.
In short, when monorails degrade over time, which happens to all moving parts, repairing them is nigh impossible.
The LVCVA hoped to sustain its monorail system, but it expected to pay outside parties to maintain everything.
There’s a problem with that.
One Business Died, and the Other’s Dying
Sometimes, when you’re researching a story, every piece of news gets a little bit worse. This is one of those times.
In the past, I’ve referenced Bombardier, who had been the Western Hemisphere’s foremost monorail manufacturer.
I can go back six years on this story, when Disney Legend Bob Gurr accidentally gave away the fact that Disney had bought new monorails.
Well, that’s what we thought at the time. The story kept popping up when I was fact-checking other stuff.
In 2019, Bombardier’s quarterly earnings report showed the kind of nine-figure purchase that hinted at a Disney fleet.
Obviously, that wasn’t the case, or, if it was, Disney canceled the deal because of…unpleasantness.
The article I linked is from November 2019. COVID-19 started wrecking society the following month.
At that moment, everybody in the monorail industry knew they were screwed, including Bombardier.
As you might know, Bombardier is primarily a jet manufacturer. Monorails were a side hustle that stopped being profitable.
In January 2021, Bombardier sold its rail business, including the monorail business to Alstom, a French company.
So, should Disney purchase a new fleet of monorail trams, they’d ostensibly come from Alstom.
Alas, the rail business isn’t doing so hot. Like monorails, it’s a low-margin industry, at least for personal transportation.
For commercial freight, rail systems have an argument as THE highest profit-margin business in the United States.
For the people trains, the pandemic may have permanently disrupted an already shaky business model. Here’s an explanation if you’re interested.
Not coincidentally, Alstom is now in dire financial straits, with people pointing toward the Bombardier purchase as a reason why.
That’s the company Disney used and the company that replaced them. One is dead, and the other’s possibly dying.
Why Disney Has a Monorail Problem
Obviously, with 45 monorail systems still in operation, you can find people who know the inner workings of Disney’s fleet.
The problem is that a past Disney mistake, a repeated one, has finally caught up with the company.
Disney repeatedly delayed any and all opportunities to buy a new monorail fleet at Walt Disney World.
I mean, they might have done that as recently as 2019, presuming Bob Gurr was right!
The current fleet, the one that Disney is meticulously updating at the moment, is the Mark VI.
When did Bombardier build the Mark VI fleet? 1989.
Folks, the monorail you love is like a classic car. It’s an antique that you could take to the car show, where you’d get oohs and ahhs.
At this point, when Disney cannot repair something on site, it’s exceptionally challenging finding someone else with the right parts.
That problem will only grow worse if Alstom enters bankruptcy or sells to another company.
As things stand, Disney has (unwillingly) switched from a Canadian company to a European one.
That aspect alone makes all the replacement parts more expensive due to the raised transportation costs.
Each year, this problem gets a bit worse, too.
A New Hope?
Disney’s current fleet has aged gracefully, but it’s the C. Montgomery Burns of monorail systems.
Unless some startup finds a way to manufacture monorails more efficiently, it appears to be a dying form of transportation.
The only good news I have here involves a 2006 documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car?
Someone saw that and thought, “Hey, we should try making a new electric car,” and…here we are.
We need someone to do the same for monorails. Otherwise, Disney’s beloved transportation will go extinct.
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