Alden staRRcar

The Alden staRRcar, short for Self-Transport Road and Rail Car, was a design for a personal rapid transit (PRT) system designed by William Alden in the 1960s. It originally envisioned small electrically powered cars suitable for short distance trips at low speed within urban areas, which could optionally merge onto tracks that would provide power and guidance for high speed travel over longer inter-city distances. It was one of the earliest dual-mode vehicles to be proposed, and one of the earliest to be actually built.

Over its lifetime the design changed dramatically, originally a four-person vehicle with dual-mode operation but eventually emerging as a much larger people mover for 20 people. In this form, Boeing Vertol was awarded a construction contract in 1970 to build a demonstration system in Morgantown, West Virginia. A smaller system was also built by their licensee, Kobe Steel, and installed at the Expo '75 on Okinawa (as well as the more advanced CVS). The Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit system first opened for service in 1975, and with the exception of a closure for a major expansion, has remained in service since then.

William Alden, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, started Alden Self-Transit Systems Corporation around 1955. His idea was to design a "dual-mode" transit system – small cars that operated like traditional electric cars when driven around town for short distances, but allowed long-distance travel via automated guideways that provided power. The vehicle were quite lightweight because they could only travel at low speeds when manually guided and didn't need full crash safety or large battery packs. On the guideways they travelled much faster; they were protected from collisions by the automated guideway, and conductors on the guideway provided the power needed for high speeds while also recharging the batteries for local travel at the destination. Alden envisioned guideways being built in place of the existing interstate roads, but the automatic guidance allowed for much shorter headways and thereby increased route capacity, reducing the need for multiple lanes.

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