“Please stand clear of the doors. Por favor manténgase alejado de las puertas.”

Walt Disney World's futuristic monorail has been whooshing guests around the resort since 1971, and for millions of visitors it's as much a part of the Disney iconography as Cinderella’s castle or Spaceship Earth (the EPCOT ‘golf ball’). There are even monorail shirts on Amazon; the sellers have carefully avoided any mention of Disney, understandably.

The looming problem is: the trains are old — the current fleet dates to 1989 — and they're starting to fail in worrying ways. A fire forced an evacuation in late 2025, and last spring a power outage stranded guests inside sealed cabins in the Florida heat, with riders prying open emergency windows just to breathe. The trains still run most days, but the cracks are showing.

Disney can't simply order new ones. Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) built the first monorails (called Mark IV) for the 1971 opening. In the late 1980’s those were phased out in favor of Mark VI monorails built by Bombardier. Along the way, Bombardier sold their rail division to Alstom, who no longer makes trains compatible with the 26” width of WDW’s monorail tracks.

That appears to leave Disney with three not-so-great options: keep patching the old trains until one breaks for good, pay a manufacturer to custom-build something nobody else wants, or tear down miles of elevated track across the resort and start over, which would be as expensive and disruptive as you can imagine.

For now, Disney is keeping quiet and keeping the trains running. That can only last so long. What would you do if you were in their position?

Oh, and why am I thinking about this today? Because Las Vegas seems to have the same problem, and doesn’t have a great solution.