to ride the belt at an operating cost predicted to be much lower than escalators or elevators. This could have been accomplished by an escalator, but the Speedramp would allow wheeled luggage, small handcarts etc. Today, several manufacturers produce similar units called moving walkways.Ī Speedramp was very similar to a Speedwalk but it was used to change elevations up or down a floor level. Customers were expected to include airport terminals, ballparks, train stations, etc. They were supported by a moving handrail. The passengers would walk onto the belt and could stand or walk to the exit point. Goodyear would sell the concept and Stephens-Adamson would manufacture and install the components.Ī Speedwalk consisted of a flat conveyor belt riding on a series of rollers, or a flat slippery surface, moving at 1.5 mph (2.4 km/h) (approximately half the speed of walking). He felt that with Goodyear's ability to move materials in large quantities on conveyor belts they should consider moving batches of people.įour years of engineering design, development and testing led to a joint patent being issued for three types of people movers, named Speedwalk, Speedramp, and Carveyor. In late 1949, Mike Kendall, chief engineer and Chairman of the Board of Stephens-Adamson Manufacturing Company, an Illinois-based manufacturer of conveyor belts and systems, asked Al Neilson, an engineer in the Industrial Products Division of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., if Goodyear had ever considered working on People Movers. PHX Sky Train in Phoenix, Arizona, United States opened in 2013 Small sections of this track bed, and a nearby heavy rail track bed, have been proposed for reuse. The railway ran reliably for the two years of the exhibition, and was then dismantled. The carriages ran on two parallel concrete beams and were guided by pulleys running on the inner side of these concrete beams, and were propelled by gripping a revolving screw thread running between the tracks in a pit by adjusting the pitch of this thread at different points, the carriages could be sped up, or slowed down to a walking pace at stations, to allow passengers to join and leave. This railway consisted of 88 unmanned carriages, on a continuous double track along the northern and eastern sides of the exhibition, with reversing loops at either end. One of the first automated systems for human transportation was the screw-driven 'Never-Stop-Railway', constructed for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London in 1924. Opened in 1969, it was one of the first operational automated people mover systems in the world. Interior of SEA Underground in Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Another term " light metro" is also applied to describe the system worldwide. Other complex APMs have similar characteristics to mass transit systems, and there is no clear cut distinction between a complex APM of this type and an automated mass transit system. Larger systems, with vehicles with 20 to 40 passengers, are sometimes referred to as "group rapid transit" (GRT), although this term is not particularly common. These taxi-like systems are more usually referred to as personal rapid transit (PRT). Some complex APMs deploy fleets of small vehicles over a track network with off-line stations, and supply near non-stop service to passengers. The most generic is "automated guideway transit", which encompasses any automated system regardless of size. Generally speaking, larger APMs are referred to by other names. Propulsion may involve conventional on-board electric motors, linear motors or cable traction. Now, however, the term "people mover" is generic, and may use technologies such as monorail, rail tracks or maglev. Finally the last, called PeopleMover or WEDway PeopleMover, was an attraction that was originally presented by Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and that opened at Disneyland in 1967. The second, alternately called the People Mover and Minirail, opened in Montreal at Expo 67. One was Skybus, an automated mass transit system prototyped by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation beginning in 1964. The term was originally applied to three different systems, developed roughly at the same time. The term is generally used only to describe systems serving relatively small areas such as airports, downtown districts or theme parks. A people mover or automated people mover ( APM) is a type of small scale automated guideway transit system.
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