AS any devoted viewer of The Simpsons will tell you, even Springfield had a monorail, and we take delivery of ours today!
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No, it is not some dexterous scheme by council to introduce free public transport at a dollar fifty a ticket. Rather it is the newest addition to Inverell’s National Transport Museum and it is only a six metre length of track and the front car. The one shaped like the space shuttle said the promotions officer for the museum, Kevin Dunn.
“At last we’re going to have our own monorail,” Kevin said.
“It won’t be very fast though, I can assure you, but it will be of great interest and I believe it will eventually become an icon of the area.”
As with the trams in Sydney, the state government’s scrapping of the monorail led to the museum’s successful attempt to get hold of another part of Australia’s transport history.
“We managed to procure one of the carriages and that will ensure that it’s kept for posterity, for a start, and school children who have never seen a monorail will get the chance to view it,” Kevin said.
“Hopefully we will set up some sort of platform that will allow the public to actually enter the carriage and experience what it’s actually like inside.”
It is planned to have the carriage set up on the short length of track outside the museum’s new premises in Rifle Range Road, and Kevin estimated the track would have to be about two metres high to be effective and visible from the road.
The carriage and track will be stored by Boss Engineering until it is erected outside the museum’s new building.
“We’ll need pretty heavy lifting gear to put it up,” Kevin said.
“The carriage itself is five and a half metres long, two and a half metres high and two metres wide and weighs five tonne. All up it could end up being about seven tonne in total. We wouldn’t have the room inside to do it justice.”
“Council have been very, very supportive about the monorail because its’ something that makes the town a bit unique.”
Kevin said from what he has been told so far the Powerhouse Museum has received two carriages and a 10-metre length of track and our transport museum would probably be the only one north of Sydney with a monorail car.