Years ago, I made two videos on strange elevators that go both horizontally and vertically.
The first was in Genoa, Italy.
It's a little cabin that travels along a tunnel
which then gets loaded into a regular vertical elevator.
The second is in a test tower in Rottweil in Germany.
It uses fancy, complicated locking mechanisms and linear induction motors.
But the key thing about both those designs is: they come to a complete stop when changing direction.
Because of how elevators work, safely and smoothly transitioning
from horizontal to vertical just isn't possible.
Or at least I thought so.
But it turns out that the Schmid Peoplemover
has been doing exactly that for about 20 years.
Only three of these have ever actually been installed.
Only two of them still exist.
This is the larger one, at a train station in Altbach, Germany.
It took me a long time to understand how this works, and how it works safely.
I had to hire an engineering consultant to look at the original patents
and break it down for me.
And also, with the help of a producer in Germany...
I tracked down the inventor.
[IN GERMAN:]
This cabin isn't being pulled by cables, the motor is in the cabin itself,
it pulls itself along by turning a pair of cogs up top
that sit on rack rails, one on each side of the cabin.
So this is basically a cog railway.
A very fancy one with anti-shake devices, but a suspended cog railway.
And that explains the smooth transition to vertical at the top: the cogs just
follow the rails as they curve.
But how does it do this safely,
and then travel vertically without, you know, falling to the ground?
Well, like the elevator in Genoa, it does get a bit of help on the vertical part.
It locks onto a carrier device and a counterweight, with safety systems
that are roughly equivalent to a regular elevator.
The carrier is what you can see start moving through the window
as you transition to vertical movement.
And meanwhile, down on the bottom, the counterweight
sits on calibrated springs, so that as this cabin started to transfer to vertical,
the counterweight gently lifted away from the springs...
and everything balanced.
There is an elegant but also quite complicated
docking and undocking mechanism up there in the roof of the cabin and the carrier.
The closest analogy I can come up with is that it's a bit like closing
an up-and-over garage door. Everything just sort of slides into place.
It's a wonderful design, but it's also complicated.
And the alternative is to put in an underpass, or
two mass-produced elevators and a footbridge between them.
Because if one of those elevators breaks down, well, it can be fixed
by any qualified technician using off-the-shelf parts instead of someone
who has to be specially trained for this one rare bit of equipment.
And if you have a footbridge, you probably also have stairs.
So if one of those elevators breaks down, there's a backup.
It doesn't work for everyone, but it's better than nothing.
And that also means that if you are late for your train and physically able,
you can just run up, across, and down the footbridge instead of waiting for the Peoplemover to arrive.
Now, that said, there are advantages to this system.
It requires much less land than a regular footbridge does.
It doesn't need tunneling like an underpass.
And if you have heavy or bulky bags, well, you don't have to
haul them in and out of multiple elevators and across the footbridge,
it just takes them across for you.
I think there is a possible world in which this design became popular,
and the parts became off-the-shelf, and this became the standard.
I don't think it's a bad invention.
It's very clever. It solves a specific problem.
But when there are more common and more reliable alternatives
that are just a bit more hassle to install...
well, not many places wanted to take the risk.