Back in 2012, I came across Mike Andrews, an engineer who was selling conversion kits for the Disney Monorail toys that were sold at Disney World and Disneyland. Being a lifelong fan of all things Disney, especially the monorail, I had accumulated an attic full of monorails and various monorail accessories throughout the years. Unfortunately, this is where they sat, untouched. I always wanted to make a layout for them but never seemed to have the time. When I discovered these kits that would allow the monorails to be controlled independently of each other on the same layout by a laptop computer, I was intrigued. So I went ahead and purchased a couple of the conversion kits with the intention of modifying the monorails and trying this new system out. However, once again, life got in the way and these kits ended up in the attic with the rest of my monorail stuff where they sat for 5 years! Out of sight, out of mind! Fast forward to 2017 when I stumbled upon the kits, still in the box they were shipped in 5 years previously. I decided it was time to finally start to build these monorails. So I opened up the boxes and was about to get started with the building process but I quickly realized that I had misplaced the assembly instructions as well as the software to be able to operate them! After searching the internet, I realized that Mike, the individual who designed and manufactured the conversion kits, was no longer selling them! After poking around on a couple of the Disney discussion boards, I was able to locate him and send him a message asking about the assembly instructions and software. Thankfully, he was very receptive to my message and provided me with all of the necessary information I needed to get started! He turned out to be an invaluable source of knowledge, helping me trouble shoot various technical issues I encountered along the way. After completing a couple of the conversions, I was ready to try them out on a small layout I had thrown together in the basement of my house. I was very impressed with the way the whole system worked and quickly envisioned building a more permanent, large-scale layout in the basement. Unfortunately, my lovely wife did not share my enthusiasm for such a project! On day while sharing my dilemma with one of my sons, he suggested building the layout at my office instead. After mulling it over for a bit, I decided why not! The next few weeks were spent designing what the layout would look like and how it could actually be constructed. Among the challenges that had to be overcome were insuring that the monorails could be seen but not touched and how to allow the monorails to travel through the entire office and not just in the reception area. I mean if you are going to do it, you might as well go big or go home! After much thought, I decided that the layout was going to have to pass through some walls in order to achieve the effect I was envisioning in my mind. I believe I kind of left this part out of my layout description when I was describing it to my wife! Anyway, I began the actual installation of the track in October of 2017. It took about 5 months to get all the track installed and then an additional 3 months or so to work out all the bugs so that the monorails would actually be able to run throughout the office as intended. It was during this time that I learned why no one had ever installed such a layout in an office that actually went through walls! The strength of the signal simply was not strong enough to maintain contact with the monorails, which meant the system would shut down. Thankfully, Mike, the designer of the system, was kind enough the help find a solution to the signal strength issue. By find a solution, what I actually mean is that he redesigned the entire system, upgraded the hardware and further developed the system so that it worked perfectly! Over the next few years, he continued to upgrade and improve the system. The latest upgrade involved completely re-writing the software and redesigning the hardware so that the whole system can actually be operated from an app on a smart phone!
