A History in Postcards
Chapter 2 The First Chromes page 4 : Are we forgetting something?
THE RESORT CARDS
On the other hand the Contemporary Resorts Postcards 01110250
GRAND CANYON CONCOURSE CONTEMPORARY RESORT and 01110252
CONTEMPORARY RESORT do Have Florida flags on their earliest
printings.
 01110242 MONORAIL TO THE MAGIC KINGDOM 01110242 MONORAIL TO THE MAGIC KINGDOM has an interesting view. The young low growth around the perimeter of the Magic Kingdom lets a lot of details show from the glass canopy over the dining room of the Crystal palace Restaurant to the Skyway buckets and some Idols peeking over the growth of the Adventurland jungle. The card also features a view of one of the early series of Walt Disney World monorail trains a Mark IV monorail. The first three models of monorail produced for the Disney theme parks were all used at Disneyland, and not surprisingly are referred to as the Mark I, Mark II, and Mark III models. The styling of the Mark IV trains produced for Walt Disney World was a bit of a departure from those models produced for Disneyland. Bob Gurr the designer of the Mark IV trains has a wonderful series of articles over at Laughing Place.com his series of articles, entitled Designer times, includes an article on the design of the sleek beauties of "the Highway in the sky". This article includes mention of the fact that the Mark IV's were assembled at the Martin Aircraft (Martin Aircraft later became Martin Marietta, then Lockheed-Martin)facility in Orlando. I'm not quite sure I can pin down the relationship between Martin and Disney on this project but judging by Mr. Gurrs article it was a very close relationship since Dave Gengenbach, who managed the project for MAPO (MAPO was the early name of Walt Disney Imagineering), had offices both in Glendale (MAPO) and at Martin in Orlando. What ever the relation between the two companies, Disney, at that time, had more experience with monorail technologies than pretty much anyone else in the USA, since they had built their own trains and track in California at Disneyland. In fact for a few years in the 1970's Walt Disney Productions owned a transportation development company of their own that built some trains based on the WedWay peoplemover technology for the Houston Airport, later Disney sold off it's transport division, with the result that the Mark VI trains were purchased from an outside vendor Bombardier. and what have we here? Why a postcard of Martin Aircrafts facility in Orlando, and it looks like a circa 1960's or 70's view 
The First few Mark IV trains had five cars as more trains were added they went to six car trains for the remainder of the fleet. The Walt Disney World monorails don't have names as the Steam trains that run around the Magic Kingdom do,nor are they referred to by number (which he steam trains also have), to tell one train from another they are referred to by Color, as in the sentence " Monorail red is running on the resort loop today ". There are currently three monorail loops the original two " resort " and "Express" encircle the Seven Seas Lagoon and both go through the Contemporary Resort Hotel, the third loop is the Epcot loop and was added early in the construction of that park. According to this list In the opening weeks of WDW there was a bit of a transportation shortage, as only a few of the first Mark IV trains had been delivered. (list from the Disney fanzine Persistence of Vision issue #2)
According to an article by Karl Butier writing for Mouseplanet the last two Mark IV monorails (Coral and Lime)were delivered in 1977. That is quite a gap between the construction of monorail Black and those last two, but then again it was far more trains than were needed at the time as Epcot was still a few years off even at that point. These trains ran until December 1989, when they were replaced by the Mark VI monorail fleet The article by Carl (link above) also details the very special career extension the last two trains had, as, in 1995, they became the first two monorails for the Las Vegas system, where they handled 5 million passengers annually until retirement in early 2003. most of the other Mark IV trains have been scrapped though one of the end cars of Mark IV Red was sold on Ebay. |
The photographic view above seems to mimic the view of one of
the Pre-Opening cards (card FL-029)
01110268 and 01110269 are twin views of WDWs twin Championship
golf courses the Palm and the Magnolia.
Card 01110273 FORT WILDERNESS shows some of the outdoor
activities available to visitors of Fort Wilderness.
This early view of the transportation hub at the entrance to the Magic Kingdom seems most notable to me for the side wheeler steamboat (link to side article on the larger water craft of the seven Seas Lagoon). bringing guests to the dock in front of the Magic Kingdom.
0111-0251 CONTEMPORARY RESORT is the first card of the 01110000 series that has a hyphen in it. It comes in both Flag and non-flag versions. All the other cards with hyphens in them I suspect were 1975 or later, both from the postcards and the subjects. There are no pre 1975 postmarks in the hyphenated cards I have. Also this card has, in addition to the regular post card number, a Dexter Press number. All of the other cards with DP numbers I have are in the 0111000 series. So I suspect this is an earlier card where the hyphen was inserted by accident at some point. I am aware of only one other hyphenated card that comes in a Florida flag version, that is card 0111-0350 WELCOME TO THE MAGIC KINGDOM . In the case of that card I suspect it was printed with a Florida flag logo by accident.
Now let's see... We've met down on old Main Street, braved the jungles of Adventureland. visited the old west of Frontierland and Colonial America via Liberty Square. We've even been around the Seven Seas Lagoon and Bay Lake, That pretty much covers all the areas of Walt Disney world that existed on opening day doesn't it.....What's that? you say I've forgotten something? And so I have!
Unfortunately that's because Disney seemed to forget it too. Since Space Mountain and the Star Jets didn't open until 1974. and the Wedway Peoplemover didn't open until 1975. and according to Disney A to Z, Flight to the Moon didn't open until Dec. 24 1971, America the Beautiful Nov. 25, 1971.If you had wings opened June 5, 1972. The Carousel of Progress was operating,... but not at WDW it was still at Disneyland where it continued to run until Sept. 9, 1973. So in those opening weeks of park operation the Grand Prix Raceway ,and the Skyway to Fantasyland were the only attractions in operation. As far as I'm aware there were no postcards of Tomorrowland on opening day. I don't even think a postcard booklet was done of Tomorrowland at WDW. Since Tomorrowland is the area that has probably changed the most since opening day it's probably the area I'd most like to see pictures of.