Cities were so beautiful before we destroyed them with all the streets for cars. Also modern buildings look really ugly. We need more ornaments in architecture.

Here's the original 1902 footage as digitized by MoMA, without AI bullshit smeared over it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ud1aZFE0fU

Oh man I love the aesthetics of the 1902 trains, gorgeous.

This is fantastic! Though my main takeaway is that we’ve seemingly forgotten how to make our cities aesthetically pleasing.

Monorails are somewhat cheaper than elevated trains (if you don't have extreme disabled-evacuation laws) but more expensive than a conventional train at ground level, and junctions are a nightmare. So they only work where you have a single isolated line and would need to elevate most of the track anyway (and suspended rather than straddle-beam improves cornering performance but at a cost, so is only worth it if your route has many sharp corners as well).

For Wuppertal, where the town is pretty linear along a river valley, it works. (Even then, a straddle-beam monorail would probably be more cost-efficient if you were starting from scratch). For most places it doesn't.

The reason this was used in Wuppertal is that because the town is a steep valley with a river in the middle, so the best/only place to hang the track was over the river.

Wikipedia has the (not very long) full list of every "dangle-train" ever built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_railway

+1 for the Shonan-Monorail.

For those travelling to Tokyo, go to Kamakura, take the famous Enoden to Enoshima, then take Shonan-Monorail to Ofuna and return to Tokyo.

Japan has a lot more of these, though normally the tracks are below the wagons, which is presumably more efficient.

Half-asleep, expecting normal train scenery, and then bam: suspended train casually gliding over a river

Turning also doesn't involve slippage in trains. Many locomotives already have independently turning wheels, and the solid axles of train carts can also turn just fine (as explained in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_-UJNETSlg for example)

Lots of unnecessary complexity. In this case it makes sense because the majority of the line is directly over a river due to space constraints, but it's a lot simpler to build a concrete viaduct and run normal trains ovwr it. This also allows the train to transition to run underground or at-grade.

Not an engineer, but just looking at the photos, this takes an enormous amount of steel. While most elevated rail is just a concrete bridge with a small amount of structural steel.

Most rails lines continue far enough to leave dense urban areas where this makes sense so they have to transition between elevated and ground level tracks which this can't do.

I think the lock-in is the biggest issue. If you have a hanging rail system, you can't just transition off the hanging rail to bottom rail when no longer needed like you could with elevated bottom rail.

That’s much more common than one would think. The London tube began operation 160 years ago. The U1 line in Berlin was constructed between 1902 and 1926. The central railway lines are substantially older. The Paris metro began operation in summer 1900.

Bridges in old cities are very often much older than a century.

The ship lift in Niederfinow that connects the Oder-Havel Canal to the Oder river went into operation in 1936 - the canal that it serves dates back to 1743. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiffshebewerk_Niederfinow

The Hoover hydroelectric dam is now 90 years old.

I mean, you could say this of many if not most cities, I would think, for at least some part of the transport system. I can see elements of this from my office window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_and_Kingstown_Railway - it's almost 200 years old. Still carrying a train every few minutes at peak times.

(Obviously a bit of a railway of Theseus at this point, in that besides the bridges there's ~no part of it which is literally from 1832.)

A lot of the rail infrastructure in the UK is older than that - e.g. I use the Forth Bridge quite a lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Bridge

You may be thinking of the M-Bahn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Bahn - though fits almost none of the details:)

You might consider it an eyesore, but the river is hardly ruined by it.

Five human dead in 125 years is a record to envy for most transit systems. (Light rail likes to run into pedestrians, almost as much as buses.) And it was a maintenance failure, not an operator or structural one.

Not to count the baby elephant that fell out of one car back in 1950.

Wuppertal is a wonderful ride for many thousands daily, millions for decades, and is a wonderful model of visual, sane, safe engineered public transport.

It was not the railway’s fault. As always in these cases, it was the squishy humans making the mistakes.

Seriously, who works on a railway until 6 in the morning? That’s like deploying on a Friday afternoon at 16:50…