Riding The Rail

Earlier this month my old friend Tim was in town, we made an appointment to meet at Khrung Thonburi BTS Station.

From there we’d take the Orange Line skytrain to wherever and afterwards go for a walkabout as usual.

Only problem was that I couldn’t recall much about the Orange Line, but I assumed that a lot had changed since my 1 year absence.

We met at Khrung Thonburi and Tim offered his apologies as he’d meant the Golden Line which started at the neighboring station.

That confused me even more because I’d never heard of anything like that.

A short walk brought us to the Golden Line section and I was very surprised to see the carriages, very different from the standard BTS ones.

From a distance we saw our train arriving, it looked like more like a monorail until it came closer and we could see its wheels.., wheels?!

The only train that might have problems due to a flat tire…

The pseudo monorail arrived, passengers got out, we went inside and got another surprise; nice large windows without advertising providing great views of the city.

Another first, these contraptions are fully automatic, no driver!

The route itself is (for now) rather short, just 3 stations, ending at Khlong San where we got off.

Afterwards I did some Googling and discovered that the main reason for its construction was ICON Siam (the second station!).

The end of the line at Khlong San for now...

G1 = Khrung Thonburi, G2 = ICON Siam, G3 = Khlong San, G4 = Prajadhipok (should be ready in 2023).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Line_(Bangkok)

But why they decided to go for a completely different form of transport, in this case the Chinese made Bombardier Innovia APM 300, remains a mystery to me although I have my suspicions ;-)

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