“Anything that has the Disney name to it is something we feel responsible for.” ~ Walt Disney

***UPDATE*** The article I linked to (and other reports) have updated their information to explain this wasn’t a head-on monorail collision, but that one of the trains was parked at the TTC when the other plowed into it. While I still find this accident to be shocking, that explanation of events makes far more sense than the early reports I read. I’m going to leave the entry as I originally wrote it, but I just thought I’d clear up the facts here for anyone reading. This is still a very bizarre accident for anyone familiar with how seriously WDW takes the monorail system.

I woke up today to three emails from friends informing me about THIS incident at WDW. I read the details but hadn’t seen the photo until this point.

Anyone who knows me well knows I’m a Disneyphile of the WDW variety. In the years (and they are many) that I’ve been intimately acquainted with the (park, then parks, then campus, then…) Florida branch of the mighty empire, I’ve never seen anything like this.

Please understand, accidents and deaths are not that unusual. You can find sites and even a snopes special category that deals with tragedy rumors and facts on Disney property. I’ve both witnessed and read about oodles of accidents and malfunctions. I’ve had friends who worked at parks tell me horror stories and point out places where one incident or another occurred. I’ve witnessed broken bones, heat-stroke, and heart-attacks by other guests. I witnessed one attempted suicide that was, thankfully, unsuccessful. I’ve seen boat crashes and when I was a kid I even saw someone nearly topple over the side of the track stairs inside Space Mountain while they were evacuating us from our seats due to a lights-on-everybody-out breakdown. Hell, when I was five years old I got it into my head that I wanted to look down between the wells of the monorail tracks at the station and lost my balance. But for a very quick-thinking cast member, I would likely have broken my neck while my grammy was still fishing Tic-Taks out of her handbag.

It’s a lot of land and it hosts a lot of people and there are a lot of machines doing lots of things. Suicides, plane crashes, equipment malfunction, etc — it all happens. And maybe I’m wrong, but I have to say, I have *never* seen anything like this photo. The monorail is an icon of the Disney theme park universe and the Mark IV, to the best of my knowledge has never had more than the most cursory type of malfunction. The system is automated with cascading safety measures and the pilots are there backing those up. This kind of incident — two trains heading in opposite directions on the same track — it just doesn’t happen. Knowing what I know about how carefully this particular aspect of WDW is managed, I just don’t understand how it’s possible. If there weren’t photos, I’d have a hard time believing it.

This isn’t a door that wouldn’t seal. It’s not some idiot standing up in his seat on a roller coaster. It isn’t a stall and tow-in. It’s not even lightening hitting at an inopportune moment. This is two trains heading straight for one another. It’s simply unfathomable. There is failsafe upon failsafe built into the system for this.

From Wiki:
Attempting to drive the train too quickly in a given speed zone will result in an “overspeed stop”, often subjecting the driver to good-natured ridicule by his co-workers. Train spacing is maintained by the Moving Blocklight System (MBS), also known as the MAPO (for “Mary Poppins”) system, which establishes a number of “holdpoints” throughout the system(http://www.monorailyellow.com/monorails.asp). At any given time, there must be at least two holdpoints between a given train and the train ahead of it. When the train detects that there are fewer than two holdpoints between itself and the preceding train, the emergency brakes are immediately applied and cannot be released until sufficient spacing becomes available or the operator explicitly overrides the system. Failure to maintain adequate spacing is known as an “overrun”, and is treated as an extremely serious offense.

Maybe it’s just a very tragic and unlikely-to-the-point-of-near-impossibility accident, but a failing of this magnitude may also be an undeniable indicator of the serious toll that the current state of the economy is taking on all consumer-based businesses. If that’s the case, I’d really hate to have been the one on watch because corporate Disney is a shark-invested hell on good days and given the investigation that’s about to hit, they’re gonna need a fall guy in short order.