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Karl Parker earned his way into the monorail hall of fame with a 15-minute movie short. Why Not Monorail? documents the benefits of elevated travel along narrow concrete guideways. It may be the most important argument for this long-overlooked transit technology ever committed to videotape.
But it was with My Own Private Monorail, a more personal work than its sequel, that Parker's vision of Washington-area transit was first realized. In this 1998 film, Parker, 31, chronicles his conversion from harried Beltway commuter to single-minded single-rail devotee. In the climactic scene, Parker is watering the plants in his grandparents' house when he comes across a black-and-white photo of Wuppertal, Germany's eight-mile Schwebebahn, at 102 the oldest operating monorail system in the world.
"I've always known that it was a suspended train, but I suddenly noticed why it was suspended," intones the voice-over. "It was over a river. Apparently, that was all the land that was available at the time for the tracks. Suddenly an epiphany occurred.
"The river...cars...suspension...that's it!" In the film, Parker concludes that the answer is to put suspended monorail along highway medians, and he inserts images of monorail vehicles traveling above the Beltway. A third short film, Monobeam: A Masterplan for Maryland & Virginia, expands the utopian vision even further, showing monorail cars traveling through downtown Silver Spring and along the sides of the American Legion and Wilson Bridges.
These are the most stunning aspects of this last work: computer-generated monorail cars shown moving smoothly above shots of real highway traffic. The graphics were rendered frame by frame by Parker, who is an audiovisual technician at the National Gallery of Art.
"Karl Parker offered his video production skills in 2000 in a way that has altered the image of monorail in many circles," reads text pulled from the online "Hall of Fame" of the Monorail Society, a global advocacy group founded in 1989 by Californian Kim Pedersen. With his induction, Parker joined such legendary figures as cabdriver Dick Falkenbury, father of Seattle's monorail movement, a remarkable phenomenon Parker hopes can be repeated here one day.
Parker has a nostalgic connection to monorail. Wuppertal, the smallish city over which the Schwebebahn, or "suspended railway," soars, is his grandfather's hometown. The old photo that...