One can only marvel at the time, effort, money and considerable ingenuity that went into this project just to avoid... a second rail? It becomes more stranger when one considers that each single car would have to have its own (big, heavy, energy-consuming) pair of gyroscopes
In hindsight things look clear, especially that we know two rails have won. Back then it wasn’t so clear and it looked like a possibility. There is a lot of ingenuity there and am more surprised gyroscopes haven’t become more intertwined with modern life. I own an electric unicycle though and have to say it feels like magic sometimes, and yet EUCs haven’t caught on as I was expecting…
Even back in the day it must have appeared to some bright people that an ordinary railway stays put indefinitely when you cut the power but a gyroscope monorail does not. This is btw different from hovering, levitating and wheel-based monorails which also do not suffer from catastrophic failure on power cut. There's one very successful monorail that looks like the gyrotrain but upside down, the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal; because it hangs down from the rail, it needs no gyroscopes just to barely exist as a functioning system. As for electric unicycles, well, personally I find them as undesirable as segways, but I segue.
