The city did not purchase the Monorail system probably due to no Bond passing. These photos are rare and hard to find today. As a kid then I saw the Monorail for years before it was finally disassembled. Looking up close at the car you can tell the quality of the system was very poor. It was like an after thought from a relative of someone important in city hall, especially since it had been designed and built locally. Now it happens that today monorails in service still use the basic design of using a rubber tire suspension and rolling mechanism. The cockpit was an open air cockpit above the car, I think I read they used a Cadillac engine for the power plant. No air conditioning since it was not intended to be in service but only give a few test rides at 10 miles per hour. I was familiar with the one built on South Main and there was another on one of the other main arteries running the same direction. I feel sure had the purchase been made it would have looked much better over time. Las Vegas has one running for quite a few years today and it had a wheel failure while it was inside the city. It ran all the way out of town heading towards California and was bringing people from one of the large Hotels and Casinos to Las Vegas. These pictures are great for someone like me that saw it as you see it in the photos and years later it was gone, nothing to see any longer.
Apparently there were two attempts at an elevated monorail in Houston... Now we have the "METROrail" light rail system, which runs on tracks that are street level. Hardly a week goes by that some goofball doesn't run into those trains; people just don't pay attention.
The two built in 56 are the same company, all our travel was on South Main so I never saw the other site and the street name escapes me. I did drive on that street several times while I was home in 05 until 08. It is wall to wall business today of course but back in 56 it was pretty sparse. The video appears to be the 56 era. I hated that silly train downtown and it really made me mad to see they had made Main street a one way thru town. It was a terrible idea to put trains on today.s congested streets. Even in 36 the city leaders were smart enough to shut down the cable cars. Unfortunately all those cable cars from that era have rusted and rotted away, nothing left of any of them. We had a cable car running to Galveston from Bellaire in the early 1900s and it took that old route on the old Galveston Highway on the train route which would meet at the causeway and share the first bridge which also had a foot path which is still there but closed long ago. That train route was mainly for transporting cotton to the docks. I remember the cotton docks catching fire but not sure when it was, but I do remember it burned for a month. The bales just burn forever and you can't get them wet enough to extinguish the fires. There was also an early MOB bar and restaurant on Galveston Island just as you came across the bridge which was the second bridge and the very low one, two to be built after that one. Anyway that famous MOB place burned down in the late 40s and the remains were still visible in the early 50s. My Grandfather mentioned it to all of us as we passed it and told us it had been very popular during the prohibition period.