A Plethora of Extras from the Story of Disney's Third PeopleMover

so hello and welcome to this technology connections 2 video which is off to a very rocky start but will smooth out shortly there we go mmm we're getting there so this is the follow-up video to man it's much worse this is the follow-up video to the technology connections video on this system which is a Disney People Mover based on well it is the Disney wet way people over technology that was built at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston Texas if you haven't seen that previous video you should check it out because it goes over the history of the wet way people mover and how exactly this technology got in Houston though really we didn't come to a very strong answer on that but probably due to just stuff you know stuff happens anyway let's start with a map of the Houston Airport oh look at that a map of the Houston Airport so the George Bush Intercontinental Airport which goes by the call-sign iah Fork yeah is an airport with five terminals though you can see that really D and E are the same terminal building it's just Diaz for international departures and E is just for domestic departures and you can see that it's serviced by both the Skyway and the subway the subway which you just saw stops at the Marriott hotel and the Skyway does not that's because the Skyway is on the sterile side of the airport meaning past security will begin by taking a look at the Skyway and some of the other things that didn't get mentioned in the video so one of the things that I noticed when I was at the airport but I didn't know why yet was that terminals B and C had much older feeling stations than Terminal A or DME and it turns out that's because they are the oldest stations I had no idea this was the case but Continental Airlines which is now part of United or I guess they are United I don't know how exactly that merger went but anyway they used to have a lot of gates in terminals B and C so they actually built this people mover system to connect travelers between those two terminals so they didn't have exit security and that was in nineteen it opened in 1999 then what happened was in 2001 the system was expanded to Terminal D and keep in mind that's also terminal D now I guess back then it was just terminal D it's not clear who paid for that on Wikipedia it doesn't really mention it although perhaps the citation does but I'm a little worried and then in 2008 the airport themselves financed an extension to Terminal A so it wasn't until 2008 that the entire airport was actually serviced by the Skyway also in Athenian business an innocent so you can probably already see that now we are approaching terminal D&E and it's a very different design from the station we just left I'm not sure if you can I didn't notice when I was there though now with the benefit of hindsight it might be easier to see an actual separation in the track that indicates because this this section of track is effectively newer than what we were just on and so this was the second this was the first extension and the second of the station openings I guess you could say interesting thing about this system you can see the stop lights on the bottom right that would be for a driver who's manually driving the trains and you'll actually kind of see that in just a bit but I find it interesting that they have all of those stop lights there I mean I guess I mean I'm more surprised that they use them when the systems in automated mode I don't know what they would signify but I suppose they're probably useful for Diagnostics or something so this is a view of the system and this is kind of a bit behind the scenes as far as how I think when I make youtube videos so when I made the remark about O'Hare system crossing sides so that way there could be a continuous loop of trains I said that that's interesting but it's certainly not unique and there are people who may think that I meant unique and by showing this clip I'm hoping to prevent those comments from happening of course they're going to happen because that's how YouTube comments work but I did want to include this clip that at Houston the same thing happens that way there can always be trains going both directions and you can see that this system is actually run really well like clockwork because already there's a new train coming in general it seemed to be the wait times for a new train no matter where you were or 90 seconds or less one thing about this system and I've noticed this in Florida - is that the trains suck at lining themselves up correctly with the platform doors you can see here that the trains off by like at least a foot maybe even 18 inches output metric conversions up there and it's just surprising to me how this is an automated system you'd think it could stop more correctly but they don't so that's interesting is that really necessary at anytime as you come up the elevator on Terminal A and D and E you have this nice observation platform that you can actually wash the trains from so that's where I got the original footage now I like that this Airport includes this because it's encouraging observation of the system or at least it seems like it whereas at Orlando they don't like you watching things yeah I'll explain that in a little bit here you can see on the signs the next train is in seventy five seconds and one just left so this system really runs quite well there's almost never a wait for a train let's see how closely it lines up there's the bombardier badge on the door there interestingly on Wikipedia they list the system as being operated by Johnson Controls but I saw a lot of employees they are working for Bombardier and you're about to see that so at this point you'll notice our trains not actually stopped at the station it's right before the doors so we're moving forward and you can see that other train on the spur line there and it has its doors open at this station this guy got on our train you can see is wearing a Bombardier backpack and he opened up this panel I snuck a picture so you can see that what the panel shows is it's basically I couldn't get a great picture but he's hitting buttons that are either mats propel or minimum propel and there's also a reverse button and a brake button I don't know what the emergency button might do but essentially he just has to put in that key turn it from auto to manual and then he can drive the Train the buttons above his hand appeared to be for opening and closing the doors and I'm gonna guess that's an emergency stop button at the top I think I can see the word emergency but anyway this is a neat thing I was able to sneak a picture of I just happened to be there at the right time and they were doing something another neat thing about here in Houston is that between terminals B and C because remember that's the original installation is where the maintenance is where they keep extra vehicles and do whatever maintenance they need but I really like that the middle well not the middle but the farthest sticking out one that's like a car wash for them so I had remarked to myself that these trains were really really clean and I know from their design that they're the same as the Orlando ones so I figured they're probably not actually that new but you know they can keep them they can run it through a car wash which i think is you know it's really neat anyway that's enough looking at the Skyway let's take a look at some extra stuff in the subway so one of the things I'll show you here is how a lot of lines that I recorded here we're just like thought up on the spot and I didn't even use them and or I use them differently so you might you're gonna hear me say the same sort of thing a few times but it's just got some interesting shots behind it so I threw them in here part of what's so weird about this subway is that you could just walk the whole distance now granted it's kind of a long distance but you could do that part of what's so weird about this system is that you can just walk right along it and there's only a half wall separating you and the Train I think the weirdest thing about the system is that you can just walk right next to it it'll go right past you it's nice breeze here at Terminal A is apparently where they have a little maintenance Bay focus is struggling yeah there we go [Music] one of the things it's harder to convey about these things in video which hopefully you'll be able to see is that they they're much larger than a people we were training a much orc are much much more so than I thought they say the maximum capacity is 12 there's a decent amount of standing room and the bench would probably sit three across tightly so these are there they're a lot more modified and from the Disney people we were designed that I thought they were but from what I can tell the speed is exactly the same it's a little hard to tell because these aren't open air just gonna chime in here and say that they might actually be a little faster yeah if this isn't a little derpy I don't know what is this is actually ever this is my first time I've ever been to Texas and pretty neat stuff here I'm also wearing a mic so wondering how kicked I think I'm kind of weird please pay particular attention to your luggage and personal belongings unattended luggage and personal belongings will be treated as danger the facility do not be persuaded by strangers or individuals you do not know well to take articles before you're dangerous we appreciate your cooperation these measures are in event I haven't found evidence of it I will say that the few existing YouTube videos I've seen of this system were very dark and dingy looking and it appears that they've upgraded the lighting down here because it feels much less dank ok this part is kind of dark and creepy at least there's comforting music part of me is like how is this even allowed because I mean here I'm standing but this is like my normal height my normal height of my hand it's maybe three and a half feet oh I'm bad it it's just very weird and I mean like I said I mean you can walk you can walk this hallway there's definitely no problem but it's just weird okay so that looks like a pneumatic break maybe that's what stops them at the stations Wow I think that answers that question so I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure that this is actually longer than Disney's people mover and it's also curious there's a lot of air brakes that are able to stop it that one just open yeah so I wonder why they have that many air brakes so I sort of discovered why somehow a safety spiel was triggered by a vehicle that wasn't actually stopped you can kind of hear it here [Music] Oh interesting so this is like an emergency stop zone or something so you can see at this end this is the end and there is not a station on this side it just loops around the only station is over on this side I hope he's not making a youtube video I'm pretty sure I qualify as one of the weirder tourists in the world but I got off at the Marriott hotel and one thing that I have no clue about us that this level is open out there is the subway just kind of like an atrium I got off this was ll I thought it was Lobby level but apparently it's plural and there's some meeting rooms around here I'm in the North Tower apparently I bet if I look at some signs they can figure this out it even had a star next to it I'm terrible quite nice here still here the subway down fact that's a yeah that's the stop right there weird and let's see if double chime holds true oh yeah oh yeah this is just so weird like I I know what this is and I suppose many people don't maybe that's why I think it's weird but just the whole idea like oh yeah there's a door but you could also just jump over this thing and get onto the track why have the door and also I think that Disney's concept of having the content like the chain of them moving through a station with the moving walkway so it never stops be harder to pull off with baggage but I don't think it'd be impossible I'm forgetting about wheelchairs here that would be difficult so let's talk about the motors for a little bit because there's something that maybe you've already noticed but is interesting about their placement and that is that each adjacent motor appears to be flipped around so the motors have two parts there's like a ribbed part that's inset within another box I think that ribbed part is the actual motor itself and the cover is possibly just covering the electrical connections but is also probably covering the vehicle presence sensor and the thing is these motors are not going to be run all the time they're only gonna switch on when they detect a train above them because it would be pretty wasteful if they were running current through them all the time they probably burn out even but um so I suspect because here's the thing that I suspect in Tomorrowland when I mentioned that there are people mover collisions the reason I think that happens is if you look at the induction motors on the people mover you can see next to them there's a little like u-shaped piece and I believe that's the vehicle presence detector and if the ride has been stopped which does happen occasionally for in case there's something in the station like someone is having difficulty getting in and out of the train they do have to turn it off and so or did you have to stop the ride so if the ride has been stopped and your train happens to land right where none of those vehicle presence sensors are tripped your train just won't move because none of the motors under you think there's a train on top of it so yeah the power will come back to the but nothing happens and part of me wonders if here each motor is turned around because that's it decreases the likelihood of that happening or yeah I don't know exactly why that would be but I did find it interesting that each adjacent motor is turned around from the ones next to it I used to be a station here's a better shot of that decommissioned station this was for parking area - I don't know why exactly they decided to stop stopping the trains here I'm guessing it's just not it wasn't ever a popular station but what is also notable is that on this side all of the door hardware is still there and you can still see how tanned it's still labeled parking area - but on the other side it's all been boarded up and it looks like the doors have been removed I wonder if that was to cannibalize parts from those door mechanisms or what and one thing that I regret not doing on this trip was actually walking by here to get a better look and I didn't so oops another interesting thing is right here the track looks like it used to go to the right around this stairwell and then come back but it has since stopped wonder why so here's just some more footage on the train this time looking out to the side as you can see at Terminal A this is the other end of the station so you turn around at this point basically and once the trains are on a straightaway they are moving at a pretty decent pace I'd say this is kind of like a running speed I don't want to say it's it's definitely not like a sprinting speed but if I were walking alongside the trains they definitely pass me up pretty easily even a brisk walk these trains to be faster than that so I want to say it's about a running speed maybe a jogging speed I don't know but if I were to equate 2 miles per hour I think these trains are going maybe 10 or 12 miles per hour there's just another shot that shows how fast they're going I didn't even notice that that happened in the camera that's why I just turned around and was like oh there's a dude that walked across the tracks and then I questioned my life choices and looked at the ceiling of it so let's talk about the doors so my sub position as to how the door mechanism works is as follows you can see in this still frame that there's a bit of a like flat plate thing at the bottom of the doors it's angled downward slightly now I believe that that actually unlocks the door when it's pushed up so you can see as we approach this station here and I'm about to freeze frame this is the best freeze frame I got there's this little grabby thing at the bottom of the door and my guess is you can see it's in two parts and I think the bottom part lifts up pushes up on that bar and it squeezes it and you can see here you can see the bar inside the door and now it's not angled down anymore it's actually angled slightly up so I've got another view of that here here's that bar again you can see it's not angled down like it was in the picture it's now kind of straight out so I think that that mechanism grabs the door pushes up on it which unlocks it and then pulls the door open the other complication is you can see this red door hold button inside the train I don't know exactly how that would communicate to the door mechanism to keep it open but if that grabby thing is grabbing a pair of electrical contacts it could be that pushing that button actually shorts them out it could be as simple as that I don't really know waiting at the Marriot so is the subway so this is going to be hard to show because I wasn't filming the doors but if you look in the reflection of the window you can see that the doors just closed but then they opened again because it didn't actually shut all the way they had to reopen and shut a second time I was interesting and then this last shot here of the maintenance Bay I also noticed and you may have seen it but it's in other places but there are these indicator lights here and I don't know what exactly they indicate because there isn't a train in a right now and I can't see B but I think there was one light for each stop and then there's also a couple of giant five volt power supplies so yeah they do something [Music] so now we bring you back to O'Hare because I wanted to talk a little bit about this people mover system because it's actually rather interesting and unique so in O'Hare they use the vowel system and it's a French system it was designed originally in the 1980s and one of the more unique things I guess you could say is rather than the systems like you see in Orlando and Houston the cars aren't really guided by a center rail I believe what you're seeing in the center is actually an electrical bus bar I think it's like a third rail there are side friction tires and you can see as we come through the switch here that there are beams on either side of the track and they're basically centering the vehicle and that's how it's being guided I don't really know what the advantages or disadvantages are to that system but what is noteworthy about it is that at O'Hare and only one other place in the world and that's Taipei Taiwan they used valve two five six vehicles which are the widest variety that were ever made so basically only two places in the entire world have had these exact trains and you may be thinking to yourself that might cause a problem and it kinda did because as the system is being replaced but bar da has actually had to make a new version of the Innova APM vehicles to fit this guideway they already did it in taipei those vehicles were replaced maybe about ten years ago so they now have the enou via APM - five six which is basically just to replace the vowel - five six but yeah so that's an interesting little thing it turns out that O'Hair's people-mover is extremely unique and i'm probably going to get a bunch of comments about that in the first video if I haven't already and another thing that you may have noticed is that O'Hare's landing doors or the stations can actually accommodate three vehicle trains three-car trains but at the time that I wrote it they only had two card trains because it's really not that well used I was here when I filmed this it was a weekday I came in the afternoon the airport was pretty busy but still not a lot of people were using the APM but or actually they call it the 80s and here's a shot of that which I forgot to add in the video because oops so yeah but anyway they do call it the 80s now it turns out the reason why they are expanding it to that new multimodal rental car facility is that currently if you need to get a rental car you have to get on a shuttle bus and I guess they don't want the shuttle buses clogging up the drop-off areas at the airport which makes a lot of sense so when they built this new multimodal parking and rental car facility the idea was it will be serviced by the 80s and now all the shuttle buses can go away because everybody that needs a rental car will just get on the 80s take it all the way to that end and pick up their car there and that's pretty smart and now that I know that that was the purpose of the extension you know I think it makes a lot of sense and hopefully it helps reduce congestion at the turn whatever you want to call the departures and arrivals areas one of the things that the current per I guess the past 80s suffered from were really bad announcements they just had terrible quality take a listen the Creator the pro cabinet they can hold on their marital number three they're just clunky and they sound bad and yeah kind of an embarrassment actually so here's a view out the back of the system and you can see we're gonna pass six doors even though there's only two cars on this particular train if I were to guess why O'Hare used this system rather than the Bombardier APM 100 or something like that is because this system was designed to actually work as a metro train so for actual transit rather than just moving people and at O'Hare the remote parking and now the multimodal rental car facility are pretty far away from the terminals so this quick trip getting from terminal 2 to 3 is you know you can walk that easily you can just go down into the basement walk over and go back up to terminal 3 and so really the people mover is not even necessary for getting people between the domestic terminals you could just walk that but both the International Terminal which is on the other side of the airport and the rental car facility are far away and these trains could go 50 miles an hour so I had no idea they were going that fast but now I'm less surprised at how quick they move because it just you know it makes more sense in my head now O'Hare wanted this because it's fast and it actually is a fairly long track it has to traverse here we're going underneath the airport bridge you can see a plane right there so this is just on the way to the International Terminal we aren't even on the long stretch over to remote parking and then this is leaving the international terminal to go over to remote parking [Music] [Music] so when the new system comes online supposedly the new trains and the new management system will be able to get trains coming much more frequently than they do because I guess one of the concerns is if everybody has to get on the trains to get a rental car then maybe it's gonna really congest the system but if they can get it down to say Houston Times or the new of a train every 90 seconds I don't see why you know I don't see how it's gonna be overcrowded because I'm presuming they're gonna stick with three vehicle trains from now on and you can see them right there those are the new ones at the time when I filmed this was just January 4th I'm sure these trains were being tested but they weren't in service yet and also they have way more trains than they used to do they used to have just 15 of the grey and red trains but now they're gonna have I think 36 of the Bombardier trains and I should say there's 36 vehicles so that's going to be 12 actual consists of trains and here's the plaque from the company that actually built these trains and kind of sad that they're not going to be in service anymore but it's just a model that people didn't really buy so now Bombardier will be taking care of O'Hare's needs for the next 25 years and we'll see where we are in 2044 holy crap this video got way out of hand if you made it this far congratulations and as your award here is the Orlando story so as I was filming the people movers in Orlando well I had a run-in with the TSA and basically I was standing in the exit area of the People Mover waiting to film trains coming in so at this shot where I was standing I was standing where someone you know ordinarily is not gonna stand but they have these really great windows looking at the track of the People Mover so I stayed there for a couple of cycles of the trains coming through and one a uniformed TSA agent came up to me and she was like are you lost and I said no I've been here many times before and so I just happened to be done filming so I started just walking with her to the front but then she grabbed I guess her manager who was not uniformed and she was like I want to see your boarding pass and fun story I was traveling with family so I left my bags and my boarding pass at the gate and so I was like it's at the gate and they were like we need to see your ID so I was actually stopped by the TSA because they thought I was a suspicious person and I won't say I was detained because it wasn't like we went to a special room or anything this all just happened right by the people mover but yeah I wasn't really expecting that but that can happen if you're filming things in an airport if I were smarter I would have had my bag with me so it doesn't look like I'm just some weirdo that slipped past security but part of me was tempted to ask them how do you think I got on this side if I don't have a boarding pass something went very wrong if that happened wouldn't you say but I think that would have gotten me in much more trouble than I already in but anyway I did it for you and I hope you enjoyed this video I and the main one on the main channel because it was a lot of fun see you later

Channel: Technology Connextras

Views: 109,316

Rating: 4.9679914 out of 5

Keywords: Technology Connections, PeopleMover, people mover, IAH, ORD, MCO, Houston Airport, WEDWay, Tomorrowland Transit Authority, TTA, Chicago, Orlando, Houston

Id: Wm1fxMzGuU4

Length: 32min 20sec (1940 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019