Designer Times
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Designer Times is a continuing column by legendary Imagineer Bob Gurr on his experiences in the early days of Disneyland to benefit the Ryman-Carroll Foundation. If you missed any previous columns, click here for the list.
8. Parking Lot Trains - Ice Cream Truck - and an Autopia Bus?
As the first Autopia Mk I car design was nearing completion in early 1955, Walt had some more special vehicles he wanted designed. Since two of the new Autopia cars were to be used as police cars for the ride operators to give rides to small children, Walt thought we could have a little bus for tiny tots as well.
I drew up a preliminary design for an Autopia bus patterned after the futuristic 1952 General Motors Scenicruiser. A driver would sit in front, and several rows of kids would fit behind. Instead of the well known Greyhound dog painted on the sides, I used a Dachshund dog......really fit with the Autopia sized little bus. But this idea did not make much sense to the Disneyland operations folks. Today, the drawings reside in the Walt Disney Imagineering historic files.
The next Walt Disney idea was for a parking lot train. It was becoming obvious that Disneyland would have a really big parking lot, and Walt felt we should try to pick guests up near their cars and take them to the main entrance. I suppose we could have purchased some existing one or two-car trams from an existing manufacturer. But Walt always wanted something no one else had. And Disneyland would need not just a tram car, but a long train.
Not really understanding just how tricky a trackless train would be to have the last car run in the same path as the first car, I built a little scale model of a tram train idea. It had a single axle in the middle of each car, with three or four connected together in a train. Walt and I played with the model on the floor.....it looked like it would work, so I drew up the plans for it.
Meantime, the Yale Tractor Company wanted to be selected as the tram tractor supplier. They even agreed to style the tractor to be unique to Disneyland at no extra cost. Walt had me make one exterior three quarter drawing for Yale, and they quickly built a number of them for Disneyland in time for the grand opening.
But when we hooked up the tractor to the train of cars, we found out that unless the cars were evenly loaded, some cars would drag their hitch joints in any dips on their route. So we added castors at the hitch joints. The tippy trams looked just like Smokey Stover’s single axle car from the cartoon strip. (How many remember Smokey Stover?)
During the following year Disneyland had more trams built, but with the single axle moved back a bit which solved the tippy situation. All the earlier trams were rebuilt to the new design. The Yale tractors turned out to be too small to pull the heavy guest loads, so we bought large standard Clark tractors which worked great for many years afterwards.
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