Monorail @ the LA County Fair in Pomona, 1962

The Monorail @ the LA County Fair Pomona.

Built in the summer of 1962, the LA County Fair’s monorail offered visitors a bird’s-eye-view over the fairgrounds, carrying them in any one of its fourteen 24-seat cars on their mile-long round-trip journey that took just under ten minutes to complete. Tickets cost 50 cents, which adjusts to about $5.20 today.

With its cars suspended from a single “I”-beam, 30 feet in the air, this monorail boasted to be “different from any now operating either on the West Coast or in Europe” (providing a carve-out for the suspended monorail at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo that ran from 1957 to 2019), and press releases all stressed that it was a very different experience from the Disneyland monorail which sat atop its track.

Completed at a cost of $600,000 (approx $6.2M today), the monorail’s construction lasted just a few months with at least eight California contractors involved, led by American Crane & Hoist out of Downey. The following year, an additional $55,000 was spent adding air conditioning to the cars, as well as an undisclosed amount for extra safety features when one of the cars fell off the track.

Overall, the monorail’s run spanned four decades, with the fair adding six additional cars during a large-scale “Monorail Improvement Project” in 1990, but six years later, the monorail was removed entirely, and I can’t find anything explaining why.

In 1966, taken during Ronald Reagan's visit to the Fair with his wife Nancy while campaigning for Governor.

So what happened to the Monorail?

San Dimas, California.  Ever wonder what happened to the suspended monorail cars that once ran at the Los Angeles County Fairplex? We did too, and thanks to new TMS member, Matt Sellers, we now know where they are. The 40-passenger cars replaced the original L.A. Fairplex monorail cars in 1990, but only ran for a couple of years. The track began to crack as a result of being overstressed with the vehicles, which were larger and heavier than the originals. The entire system was removed from the Fairgrounds as a result. Similar problems were experienced by the short-lived, suspended Arrow Monorail between Excalibur and Luxor Resorts in Las Vegas, Nevada. That monorail was also dismantled in the 1990s. In a deal brokered by Ride & Show Engineering, Inc. of San Dimas, California, all ten of the L.A. County Fairplex monorail cars moved to China. They were going to be part of park called Holland Park (EuroAsia). The park’s engineers were to refurbish the cars and adapt them to a Chinese power and control system. They were also designing a stronger track system for the cars. The owner of the park, Yang Bin, a naturalized Dutch businessman, unfortunately experienced some serious legal problems in China and to date the park has not been completed. As of last year, the cars were partially exposed with some of the doors left open, and some of the local animal population has taken advantage of this free shelter opportunity. Prospects for the vehicles ever being used again currently don’t look very good.