Designer Times
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36. Five Years of Various Vehicles
In the years after the opening of Walt Disney World, WED began to explore beyond the development of new attractions for the two existing parks, Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Walt had created four shows for the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, planned the ceremonies at the Squaw Valley Winter Olympics, and continued the design work on EPCOT. The Mineral King Ski Resort project was still in work, and the company was responding to requests for various kinds of transportation systems. So the Studio, WED, and MAPO had a lot on the plate from 1971 onwards. Here's a quick look back at some of the projects I was assigned to:
CAMPGROUND RAILROAD CAR A small themed steam railroad was built to serve the WDW Campground with the locomotive built in the MAPO Works as a new original design. A very cute little chugger, it pulled a consist of small themed cars built with modern materials to look like wooden cars of the 1880's. I designed a car chassis patterned after the Disneyland Horse Drawn Street Cars adding hydraulic brakes from a 1971 Chevy Vega. I also designed the bodies, which were fiberglass bonded to an internal steel framework. This little train only ran for a few years. One of the cars later became a ticket booth at Pleasure Island.
STARJET CAR An all-new WDW version of Disneyland's old 1956 AstroJet was designed and themed with a large vertical central rocket styled by George McGinnis and engineered by former Lockheed aerospace engineer Max Convis. I designed the car bodies to look like the M2F2 Lifting Body vehicle then in test for the future space shuttle.
TURBOTRAM The EPCOT transportation planners were fiddling with all sorts of ideas on how to move guests around the Florida property. One of the wildest schemes was to build Monorail bodies and put them on ground vehicle chassis to run on a dedicated surface right of way like a railroad. This vehicle was to use a new GM Allison gas turbine engine for power. I made a lot of drawings of this wild scheme, but it died during the first world gas crises in 1974.
WEDWAY CAR The dream of linear induction motor propulsion became a reality at WDW in the mid 1970's. Our MAPO electrical engineering group developed the system, and WED mechanical engineer Ed Feuer did the preliminary body engineering following the styling design done by George McGinnis. I acted as the prototype manufacturing supervisor to develop and prove out the manufacturing tooling to build (160) WEDway cars for WDW.
CTS TRANSIT DEVELOPMENT Disney formed a new Company called Community Transportation Systems (CTS) in response to requests for various kinds of transportation systems from cities and shopping malls. WED spent years on a number of proposals formulated around some of our existing Disney transportation ideas in development. We even had a nice brochure printed up to distribute to interested venues. I did a lot of modular body designs for CTS. MAPO even built a full size mock up Peoplemover car to show to potential clients.
OMNITRAM The previous TurboTram design was resurrected again only this time it was planned to use a new Caterpiller diesel engine. This design went pretty far into preliminary engineering with some working drawings done by the MAPO drafters. We worked with Caterpiller, Rockwell-Standard and others to obtain component specifications. I made a lot of drawings for this weirdo.....it was really kinda cool looking. Like a Mk IV Monorail with a big Caterpiller in it's nose.
SPACE MOUNTAIN CAR The New WDW Space Mountain car body was designed in conjunction with the new Disneyland Matterhorn bodies. This would reduce the development cost. I designed both bodies in such a manner that we could assemble variations of common tooling to build a body for either attraction.
WEDLIFT Disney spent over a decade trying to get somewhere on the Mineral King Ski Resort project near California's Sequoia National Park. I did a lot of drawings for all kinds of transportation ideas during those years. The most interesting challenge was to develop a truly high capacity ski lift. Not being a skier myself, I had no prior snow experience. I tried all kinds of coo coo schemes until one day I had the idea to load the skiers thru the rear of a car. This allowed an unbroken line of skiers four abreast to enter the car which moved across their path in front of them. MAPO built a full size functioning ski lift station at the Glendale, California lot to demonstrate that it would work. It even was going to use linear motor propulsion. I was granted a US Patent for my design.
These years also saw the need for training new designers to develop new Disney attractions. I wound up being a design-school-marm to four new recruits. WED and MAPO eventually had a pretty large gang of engineers and drafters, including specification writers, quality assurance specialists, fastener standards engineers, and such. We even had a guy whose sole job was to create a huge morass of federal drawing standards and part numbering systems. This grew into an army of documentarions which I think sometimes spent more time on the drawing formats than on the actual design details. Every document had to comply with a (10) digit numbering system or else it could no longer be tracked in the new computer control system. I had started a simple alpha-numeric number system way back in 1963 that we called the AA Figure System. Many in the shop continued to use this system anyway since it made sense to the user.
All MAPO production tasks were fully planned in advance by the Production Planning Group located on the second floor of the MAPO building. Previously, all the tasks were pretty much figured out at the local shop level by the guys actually doing the work. But with the vast variety work now being performed, a real big aerospace type way of doing things seemed necessary. One wag noted in the late 1970's that there were more folks upstairs planning than there were shop fabricators downstairs.
Anyway, enough grumpy digression. I missed the old "just do it" Walt days and wondered how the heck we all got so much done so fast and it all worked.....long before we got organized.
oOo
Next month: EPCOT and General Motors
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-- Bob Gurr
Bob Gurr began working with Disney in 1954. He retired in 1981 but occassionally consults for the Company. Since Disney he's worked on the sinking ship at Las Vegas' Treasure Island, Universal Studios' King Kong, Godzilla for the film by the same name and much more. Among his proudest accomplishments he lists "making Walt tickled pink that some of the things he wanted to build actually worked. You could tell how proud he was when he would show off things to his friends and the press. Lincoln and the Monorail were two big ones for him."
Designer Times is normally posted the second Wednesday of each month.
The opinions expressed by Bob Gurr, and all of our columnists, do not necessarily represent the feelings of LaughingPlace.com or any of its employees or advertisers. All speculation and rumors about the future of Disneyland and the Walt Disney Company are just that - speculation and rumors - and should be treated as such.
-- Posted April 9, 2003
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