Animal Kingdom Transfer Station
The Animal Kingdom Loop A has stops at both Animal Kingdom Lodge sections, the All Star Resorts, and Blizzard Beach. This means that it can only be considered along with the Park Connector B option without having a transfer at Blizzard Beach.
A transfer station at Blizzard Beach is not recommended because this water park currently has free parking. Even if parking at Blizzard Beach cost the same as the other theme parks, I could imagine this being inadvisable, because it may be considered more convenient to park close at the water park and ride the monorail to Hollywood Studios or Animal Kingdom. Come to think of it, this could also be considered an argument against the regular stop at Blizzard Beach on Park Connector A in general.
Animal Kingdom Loop B drops the Blizzard Beach station, which naturally implies that it would pair better with Park Connector A.
Animal Kingdom Loop C drops the stop at the All Star resorts and goes to Coronado Springs instead.
Generally, all three Animal Kingdom loops strike me as being somewhat poor choices for construction because of the long length of the lines and the way the resorts are laid out straddling the swamps of Reedy Creek.
Epcot Transfer Station
Like the resorts near Animal Kingdom, the resorts near Epcot are spread across both sides of a swampy body of water (the Sassagoula River). But the Epcot resorts are even more difficult to connect by monorail because the center of this section of the resort is home to the Lake Buena Vista Golf Course. For obvious reasons, any proposed monorail extension would need to avoid crossing a golf course or the impacted parts of the golf course would need to be reconstructed to avoid the alignment.
As a result, the Epcot Loop A gets a strange amoeba shape and is an unwieldy long route.
Epcot Loop B dispenses entirely with the idea that the monorail needs to serve the Downtown Disney area. However, it would be rather strange if the only hotels with direct access to the front entrance of Epcot had some of the least futuristic themes of all the Disney World resorts.
Epcot Loop C adds a stop at Old Key West by following the resort entrance road to the water taxi dock.
Epcot Loop D ignores the Port Orleans area entirely and just serves the Downtown Disney/Typhoon Lagoon area.
I was unhappy with how long Epcot Loop D was considering that it only stopped at one resort. So I decided to add stops for the resorts at Hotel Plaza Blvd. The Hotel Plaza Blvd South station is located near the Wyndham, Holiday Inn, and the Hilton resorts. The Hotel Plaza Blvd North station is near the Best Western, Doubletree, and the B resorts. Finally, I added a station at the Buena Vista Palace resort. Although these resorts are not owned by Disney, they are located on land owned by Disney. Therefore, the feasibility of these stations is similar to that of the station at the Swan and Dolphin.
For Epcot Loop E, I also added stations at Downtown Disney West Side and the Downtown Disney Marketplace. The station labeled Downtown Disney may or may not be included in a final version of this alternative. Regardless of how many stations are located at Downtown Disney, I only gave this alternative the station score points as if it stopped at Downtown Disney just once.
Somewhat surprisingly, the Station Score per Mile of the Epcot monorail loops are fairly consistent. In a complete build out, it is possible that Alternatives B or C could be built in addition to Alternatives D or E.
Next time I will discuss the possible combinations of routes I can combine to develop a complete system. The system-wide Station Score per Mile will help me identify the top ideal build outs of a Disney World monorail system. If there are any possible monorail networks that have a higher score than the existing monorail, it will be kind of cool.
