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Sky Taxi Monorail At Houston International Airport


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  • 11 months later...

Instead of dredging up old topics, i thought i'd share these photos here...I found these while browsing through some older volumes of the Houston review:

IAH sky taxi:
mr001.jpg

the trailblazer (tested at arrowhead park):

mr002.jpg

mr003.jpg

a downtown rendering:

mr004.jpg


The Houston review of history and culture
University of Houston. Center for Public History
Published by the Houston Public Library Board, 1979-97

Edited by sevfiv
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This one was not at IAH - it was what is now Hobby. In 1966 (the date in the photo) IAH was still several years away from opening, and Hobby was called Houston International Airport.

of course...i meant HIA dern it :blush:

Edited by sevfiv
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  • 8 months later...

The arrpwhead park monorail was totally different from the Fondren road monorail (see my description in the previous posting). To get to the car I had to walk on the rail itself, wrapping my arms around the girder that the car road on-so the car was above and sitting on the rail, rather than under the rail, as in the pictures of the arrowhead park monorail. So there were two different prototype monorails and three altogether, county the hobby airport monorail.

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  • 2 months later...

Re: Monorail at Hobby

This was built as sort of a 'demo', to, hopefully, sell to Houston for mass transit. Pretty forward thinking for the time, really. It was set up just around Hobby, with plans to someday go downtown. My dad said he could not remember the developer that built it, but he rode on it once, as it was in his district. The guy was hoping for something like the L in Chicago. And we all know what happens when they try to do stuff like that in Houston!

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  • 1 year later...
Neat article...

There are a few discussions here about it in various threads, and some pictures:

http://www.houstonarchitecture.info/haif/i...?showtopic=5333

Great that J.R. was able to share those Chron photos with us!

You should also check out the monorail photos I linked to here (about 7 lines down in the second list).

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The Google Images/Life magazine collection also has some color photos of the monorail available for viewing.

Oh yeah! Found them with a "source:life houston monorail" Google Images search.

I didn't realize that there were old Houston photos in the Life Magazine collection that were undated. I probably missed some good ones in that other thread because I just did search after search of "source:life houston 19xx".

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  • 1 year later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Inspired by the Houston monorail topic, I put together a little video.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=drcDfyfs7IU

Very well done; have been looking for pictures related to this for some time; don't know if they

have been recently posted to haif topics on this however.

how can I search youtube for your other houston memory videos - i saw one today about majestic/lowes.

PS if you know of any footage or pics related to the gateway swimming pool and skating rink, circa

50s or 60s, please let us know.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 3 years later...

It wasn't the taxi driver's union that killed the Hobby monorail. Unions aren't that strong in Texas, even the Teamsters. It was the Taxi Company - Yellow Cab, which until very recent times enjoyed a monopoly on cab service in Houston, thanks to the Houston City Council members on its "campaign donation" payroll.

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Interesting book. I had no idea that there was once a monorail in 1956 on South Main and Kirby (1/4-mile test track) because this was a proposed site for the 1962 World's Fair. "But the people of Houston did not want to look like Chicago or New York City. Eight months later it was removed by popular demand and moved to the Texas State Fair in Dallas."

 

 

I never knew that Houston was a proposed site for the 1962 World's Fair. We could've had a Space Needle!

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