For anyone interested in Schuco Monorails, the website in the US for information is:

http://schucodisneylandmonorail.com

Doug, who runs the site, has added several pages on Schuco Monorail repairs. Included in the repairs are my tips on making replacement "connecting tubes" out of K&S brass 3/32 0.006 round tubes.

http://schucodisneylandmonorail.com/Repairs.html

KarlG

I have started over on my layout. I first laid some green indoor/outdoor carpet over the whole table as a base (much nicer look than the bare wood. My plan is to eventually have a Matterhorn for the monorails to circle so I started with the original 1959 monorail loop. This took about 75 pieces of Schuco track.

In the picture I use an HO scale print out of a circa 1965 blueprint of Disneyland (72 11x17 prints glued together). I then laid the track on top of the blueprint.



This is NOT going to be a 100% faithful reproduction of DL, but I hope to have some key elements, but with a lot more monorail track. I expect to be able to have running at least 7 to 8 monorails at time. I plan to keep the original loop intact and add other loops that interact with it. The Matterhorn area is a "keep out" zone until I can get around to building a Matterhorn. My layout is generally an "L" shape that covers Tomorrowland, some of FantasyLand, and Main Street.

KarlG

Karl,

That looks great. How big is the base of your Matterhorn. I figured the peak to be about 3 ft high in 1:89. It all depends on if you go with the 189 feet tall or the 89 feet tall depending on which web site you are taking stats on the mountain from!

I am going with Disneyland's stated height of 147 feet and using the current snow pattern. They said they added glass beads to the "snow" so it reflects sun light like real snow would. I might use a clear glitter to mimic the look. There are also more pine trees which were added. Also all the water falls now have LED lights on them.

That's going to be fantastic!

Karl,

What size pylons are you using?

If you haven't seen the link below before, I would highly suggest you look at it (you have to dig through Fickr to get to the higher resolution views, which are sill highly compressed). It gives a side view (marked 146 feet high) and 3 top view of the layers. It looks to be well made so likely it is at least close to correct.

As for my "base," I plan to follow the blueprint which is somewhat irregular.

Karl


http://flickrhivemind.net/flickr_hvmnd.cgi?method=GET&page=2&photo_number=50&tag_mode=all&search_type=Tags&originput=disneyland,drawing&sorting=Interestingness&photo_type=250&noform=t&search_domain=Tags&sort=Interestingness&textinput=disneyland,drawing

In part I based my pylons off of the model of the track layout at the link below (you have to download the model and have Google Earth to use it). It turns out that the monorail layout is pretty flat other than at the back of Tomorrowland (near Harbor Blvd.) where the track crosses twice. Most of the pylon are 40 feet apart (about 5 inches in HO or less than 1 track apart) and I was able to figure the most common pillar height to be about 11.8 feet which translates to about 41mm in HO scale. A so-call 40mm Schuco pillar "adds" 40mm when stacked but is about 56mm including the rubber foot and the part that is covered by the cone (which combined add about 11mm). I used the "40mm" even though the 25mm might be more to scale. I might go back and use the 25mm. I only put in pylons about every 10 linear inches or about half the pylons. In the area where the trains cross, the highest pylon would about 76mm to scale so I used an 80mm pylon (really 96mm with the foot and covering). So everything was a little higher than prototypical. I might go back use 25mm pylons as my "base" to get closer to the correct height.

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=878c7c0d00936a6848846c67671d9660

Edit for a math typo. The rubber foot and "cone area" on a Schuco pillar add about 16mm not 11mm. I used the 16mm in the subsequent calculations.

In working on my layout, I did some work on the "scale" of the Schuco Monorails. Doug Burwell (Mr. Schuco Monorail USA - http://schucodisneylandmonorail.com/) told me about a site dedicated to the old Alweg company (http://www.alweg.com/disneyalweg/alwegschucomonorail.html) that based on at 1/72 figure stated that the Schuco monorail is 1/72nd scale in spite of the 1:90th printed on the box.

I went through a two different methods to calculation the size/scale of the Schuco based off of historic pictures and information (I could not directly find the length of the Mark I but the Mark III was given) and Google maps (so I could scale things in the pictures) and both methods came up with the Schuco being about 1:72 (1:70 to 1:74). This is very much in agreement with the Alweg site above. It came out very close to this number both in length and height so dimensionally, the Schuco's are pretty close (but they certainly miss in some details like the headlines and the shape of the nose).

KarlG