9 Monorail Facts You Didn’t know.

Humorist, Writer and multiple Logies attendee Virginia Gay shares some unknown facts about Sydney’s metal snake.

Like the Loch Ness Monster, I have heard tell of the mythical ‘Monorail’, snaking through the city at night, slithering between tall buildings like some crack-headed-metal-cased Batman villain, tormenting tourists with it’s complete inability to get you anywhere useful. I even saw it once. Touched it. Yes, once I rode ‘El Mono’ as the locals call it. Took my cash, rode the shrieking, wailing banshee of uselessness all the way into oblivion, or, ‘Darling Harbour’ as the mystics termed it. I sailed it, in a Hunter S. Thomson flurry of peyote, visions and antiseptic handwash. I rocked myself to sleep in it’s yielding, fluro-lit embrace, all the while calling it by its sacred shamanic names, my Steel Snake, my Futuristic Fantasy, My Tapeworm of Tiresomeness.

I lived in Sydney for 20 odd years and only thought about the damn thing once, when somebody asked me, in delightfully accented nonsense, ‘how to mount it’. I told them it was up those stairs over there, pointed to a blank wall and sent them on their merry way.

Here, in its demise, are some Very True Facts about The Great Meccano Up-Python.

  1. You can legally have sex in any of the first five carriages but not the final one, and only if the train is moving. If you charge for your services, 35% of your total take goes to Sydney City Council. Found that out the hard way.
  1. The monorail was named after Marilyn Monorail, a fragile, highly-sexed, full-body-robot screen siren. She had that movie made about her recently. You know, Cowboys v Aliens.  
  1. The monorail is suspended on two rails, hence it’s name: ‘mono’ … wait.
  1. It is drawn by sixteen invisible horses, fed and watered hourly on PopRocks and Dr Pepper. They now have only the Harry Potter franchise to keep them in work. Hey, State Government? You never think about the welfare of the INVISBLE HORSES, do ya?
  1. Originally named the ‘elevated people mover’, this linguistic glitch meant that only Royalty, the Dalai Lama and those recently knighted could travel on it. It has since been amended to the ‘everybody people mover,’ the ‘some, usually-not-from-around-here people, mover’ and finally the ‘not people mover’ 
  1. When the monorail was originally erected there was national celebration. Everybody loved it. It has made a huge profit every single second of its being open and was considering running for election to public office. Sadly, The Scandal, has ruined those chances, but it would like you to know that no-one ever found the goat, so really, there is no case to answer, and everybody should stop asking about it.
  1. The disease ‘mono’ is named after the fact that you are most likely to catch mono on the monorail, as your parents would never let you see your first boyfriend in the house and nobody understood how much you loved each other and see point Number 1.
  1. It is a literal impossibility to even think about the monorail without singing all of The Simpsons’ monorail song from whoa to go. If you don’t know the song, you were not a child of the nineties and HAVE NEVER KNOWN TRUE JOY.
  1. The ‘monster-rail’, as Mike Carlton charmingly termed it, is, actually, a full functioning monster. An ancient curse was visited upon an earthworm by a spanner and it was doomed to roam the sky, feared as a god and hated like a kitten that’s done a stinky poo somewhere you can’t find. It has superpowers, can read your mind and shoots lasers from it’s front windows. We should all be Very Worried about revenge attacks. Once it’s off the rail, who knows where it will go? * Insert Tasmania joke here. *

Will I miss it? Of course. Every city loves a shared shame, something to complain about when the weather’s perfect, the politicians are honest, and the surf’s just right.

Would I have missed it more if I remembered it was there in the first place? I’m gonna have to be honest with you. Monowhat?

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  1. arationalfear posted this