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Designer Times
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29. WEDway, Sky Ride, and New Astrojet

WEDway - The new Monorail development and production designs was the main project in work from 1964 thru 1971. We also designed a number of new attractions right along with the Monorails. Walt always expected us to work on many things at once. It was normal for me to be designing 4 new attractions at once. At that time these included the WEDway System, the new Sky Ride buckets, and the New Astrojet, which was a redesign of Disneyland's 1956 Astrojet Ride.

Walt had long wanted some kind of overhead slow transportation system which could be built for use in cities as sort of a fast walking overview of the sights and activities in a shopping village scene. He had us start looking at how such a system might be developed in early 1964. In the earliest meetings Walt gave this project the temporary name "Peoplemover". This was only a place holder name until the real name could be decided later after a corporate sponsor had been signed up. But the development never got a real name.....so Peoplemover it was.

I looked at every possible way to load guests into a continuously moving vehicle from a moving walkway. The limiting speed was how fast a person could safely step on and off a linear moving walkway.....something like 132 feet per minute. So the capacity of the ride would be limited to the length of the bumper to bumper cars at the loading speed passing a given point even though the cars would speed up after leaving the loading area. I could cheat a bit by having the cars moving just slightly faster than the moving walkway.

But I soon had a "Eureka Moment"! What if the moving walkway was a rotating turntable? Guests could enter at the slower moving inner portion of the ring -like turntable and walk outwards toward the cars on the faster moving outer edge of the turntable. Same car length but faster outer walkway speed gave a faster car loading speed......ergo, higher capacity ride. I showed Walt a design layout of this gizmo and he said he'd just ridden such a turntable at the Swiss National Exposition in Lausanne. He sent me the very next day (Fourth of July 1964, missing all my planned holiday events) to Switzerland to study the various people moving systems on display.

These systems were very clever, but kinda dangerous if the guests did not step lively. I made 16mm B/W movies of things getting tangled up in the loading area, and returned home with ideas on how to make our system much safer. The Swiss ride, called The Telecanope, had guests entering from an overhead bridge which caused a severe pinch-point situation. So I had our guest entry ramp come up from below thru the center of the rotating ring turntable.......no unsafe pinch-points. We soon had a full size demonstration loading station built on the back lot at WED Enterprises in Glendale so we could clearly demonstrate the safe load and unload characteristics.

Meantime, MAPO mechanical engineer Bill Watkins had developed a track mounted drive wheel propulsion system based on my successful Ford Magic Skyway drive system, itself stolen from Arrow Development's wheel booster-brake Matterhorn track wheel invention. So I got to design the cars for the Peoplemover, which now had the trade name WEDway. I thought this was neat since the short street in front of WED was called WED way, an extension of the local Davis Avenue where I lived as a child in the mid 1930's. The new WEDway system was to first debut in the New 1967 Tomorrowland redesign. Walt could then demonstrate an actual working Peoplemover to interested cities and shopping malls.

The WEDway car body was to be a full blown auto-styling job using a new thermoformed material acryli-nitrile-butadiene-styrene or ABS for short. Since we would make quite a few production bodies, the thermoform tooling would be fairly complex as all the interior and exterior body shapes would be kinda "auto styling fancy". We made the model for the tooling from the famous Chevant automotive modeling clay widely used in the car industry. This is much harder than sculptor's green plasticine clay. The thermoformed ABS body panels were fastened to a steel frame using special aluminum extrusions. I designed automatic doors and an automatically raising roof which would open for the guests when the cars were in the load-unload station. Our unique WEDway performed wonderfully for over (30) years at Disneyland giving guests the slow and peaceful overhead view of all of Tomorrowland. Sort of a moving park bench for lazy people-watching.