Quad Monorail Construction To Begin Next Year for The Frontier

The results of a two-year engineering design clinic are in: Smith will construct a new, half-mile-long monorail to connect the Quad to center campus, making it more convenient for those who elect to live on the college’s growing western edge – a neighborhood known among students as The Frontier.

“We’ve heard from students year after year that they love the Quad,” said Sebastian Cobb, Smith’s chief of transportation, “but academic performance can suffer” if they don’t leave their houses soon enough to get to class on time. With construction of the new 20-unit Paradise Road apartments underway adjacent to the Quad, “investing in 19th century transportation infrastructure just made sense,” Cobb said.

The college has signed a two-year construction contract with Lanley Transportation of Hartman, PA. The project is scheduled to break ground in 2016, with passengers expected to take their first ride from Neilson Lawn to the Quadrangle in 2018.

Cobb noted that the college has examined multiple other options to address transportation to and from The Frontier, including a partnership with a local Iditarod team-in-training, a subway, and a moving walkway. “None of those worked,” Cobb said. “The moving walkway kept freezing up in the winter, a subway would be – let’s be honest – excessive, and the Iditarod sled team was distracted, as we all unfortunately remember from last winter’s incident, by unusual squirrel activity.”

Tentatively named “The So-Fly-A Smith Skyoneer,” the monorail will run 24 hours a day and will be free to any East or West Quad resident or her guest. (Editor’s note: we are collecting suggestions for a permanent name for the monorail. Please send yours in via the field at the bottom of this article).

The Quad station will be built on an elevated platform at the east end of Comstock-Wilder. The Neilson station will be incorporated into the current library’s renovation, with both projects scheduled to reach their completion in 2018.

In a design partnership with Smith’s Center for the Environment, Ecolocial Design and Sustainability, the system will run entirely on solar power and biofuel recovered from campus dining locations. The monorail will leave each station every half hour, with a single run expected to take 5 minutes.

Lanley Transportation, which has built monorails at Brockway College, the North Haverbrook Institute of Technology and the University of Ogdenville, was unavailable for comment.