Monorail For Birmingham: Honestly, Is This A Serious Idea?

Monorails are the ultimate in retro futurist chic. Gliding purposefully along their concrete rails they are a metaphor for the kind of highly structured, well-organised version of today that was imagined several yesterdays ago.

Now compaigners have suggested that Birmingham's transport future can only be assured by the development of a monorail. Are they serious?

Proposals by the Greater Birmingham Monorail Co. have been revived, amidst claims that a monorail would make more sense than sprint buses along the A34 corridor, Birmingham Live reports.

Campaigners claim they were close to winning political support for a monorail until last year.

This latest slice of bad luck is typical of the history of monorail development in the U.K. Few have been built, and even fewer have prospered. An alarming propeller-driven monorail was trailed in Glasgow in the 1920s, but abandoned. The longest-running commercial monorail at a holiday camp in Skegness closed in 2003. A handful still operate.

The West Midlands has repeatedly turned to monorails as part of its own futuristic vision. The best known was the Birmingham Airport Maglev monorail operated from 1984 to 2003. The magnetic levitation system closed when the machinery reached the end of its natural life, and it was replaced with elevated rail.

The Merry Hill shopping centre at Dudley also enjoyed a monorail, albeit briefly. It opened in 1991, but only operated fitfully from 1992, with the parts sold in 1996 for re-use in Australia. Concerns about safety and property disputes helped seal the fate of the £22M Merry Hill system which had four stations at Waterfront East, Grand Central, Times Square (for the bus station) and Boulevard. Monorail enthusiasts will remember that it was a Von Roll Mk III Series.

Monorail plans are a regular occurrence in the West Midlands, marking the pendulum-like transition from recession to boom and back again: in 2009 Birmingham Business Focus proposed a £280M monorail linking the airport to the city centre. Predictably the plan got nowhere.