 Imagine making YouTube videos about metro systems and they're always being a comment going, well actually, that's often me. But you know what, I think it's actually worth embracing the misfits and the oddballs of the rail and transit world. And so in this latest edition of the famous Strangest Railways video, we will take the top 10 strangest railways as decided by yours truly and talk a bit about them. We've got a lot of systems in front of us and I'm sure you've got a lot of opinions to share in the comments, so let's get going. Before we dive into the world's most unique railways, I think it's worth mentioning that probably more than 50% of you watching this video aren't subscribed yet. So if you enjoyed this video and other videos about public transportation, how it works, where it is, and how it's designed, then make sure to subscribe and hit the bell icon if you want to get notified. It's free and it really helps the channel. Now as I said in the previous version of this video, there is real value in looking at these strange and unusual railway systems around the world, as well as unique feats of engineering and elements of more regular systems. And that's because these unique elements and systems can inform us on the potential for our own systems. Another way of looking at it is that these systems are the answer to hearing that that's impossible, or there isn't a transit solution to that problem. And I think that makes unique or unusual systems something that's really valuable for anyone who's passionate about transit or urbanism or city planning to be familiar with. Because instead of giving up on an older system or an unusual system or saying there's a challenge too big for transit to actually be able to deal with, maybe it's worth considering whether other places in the world have solved the same problem. With that said, let's hop into our first system, which is located in Japan, home of many many unique rail systems that I could make many full videos about. This is the new shuttle. The new shuttle is a really interesting 13 kilometer, 13 station light metro style system that uses Mitsubishi's crystal mover technology, which is actually something you see on a bunch of lines in the Tokyo area. Now what is unusual about this system is that despite using this automated people mover esk technology, it actually uses a lot of single track, particularly the northern part of the line, something which I find fairly unique and think is actually a really good idea when you have a semi automated or automated system that can take advantage of that precise scheduling and operation to perfectly have trains line up at the stations where passing loops are located and then move along to the next station via a single track segment. Of course though, what makes the new shuttle really unique is that it hangs off the side of a guideway used for the Tohoku and Joetsu Shinkansen. You see when this Shinkansen was originally proposed, local residents were really upset about it because the giant new viaduct was seen as forming sort of a barrier in the community and the locals weren't really benefiting from that transit and so instead of cancelling the project or doing a super expensive underground tunnel, the solution found was to add more transit, which I find to be awesome. Now the next line we need to talk about is Zurich S10. Zurich's S-Bahn Line 10 is well in Zurich Switzerland. Now the line is 10 kilometers long with nine stations and it's a bit of a hybrid between a sort of metro style system and a mountain railway that serves mountainous recreational areas. It also features for a short while longer one of the most unique power setups on any rail line around the world, which is an offset catenary that forces the pantograph on trains, at least for now before it's reopened as a more standard line to actually be offset to the side of the train, which is a really unique solution. I've actually already made a video on Zurich S10 so definitely go check that out up here and stay tuned because Switzerland obviously has a ton of very strange and unique railways and it probably deserves its own entire video, which I'll make eventually in the future. Speaking of unique railways in Switzerland, I do have to mention again the Stussbahn system, which like many of Switzerland's unique railways ascends a mountain. Of course though the Stussbahn is not a regular mountain railway because it is actually the world's steepest funicular. What is a funicular you ask? Well a funicular is a type of incline railway, i.e. a railway that climbs a hill or mountain in this case, that uses the weight of two vehicles that are hanging counterbalance with one another to create a more energy efficient system, where the weight of a car going down offsets the weight of a car going up, saving a lot of power and reducing the amount of power the motors on the system need to generate to only the difference in weight between the two vehicles. What's even more interesting about the Stussbahn, especially for our purposes, are the incredibly unique trains, which feature cylindrical passenger cabins which rotate as the train travels up the hill. On a lot of funiculars you don't get that and that means that riding them can be a bit uncomfortable at times and they're often not super accessible because stations literally need to be built on staircases essentially. Of course allowing the passenger compartments to remain level as you climb the hill isn't just good for comfort but it also allows you to go up steeper inclines and I think it's really unique in the way that it takes a really old technology, the funicular, and modernizes it with something that is a novel but very simple idea which is the rotating cabins so definitely a lot to learn from this system. Up next is Chongqing and China with the CRT rapid transit system, more specifically lines two and three of the CRT system which are high capacity urban monorails. Now these monorail trains can be up to eight cars long which is pretty massive and honestly despite being monorails I kind of like these transit lines. The cars above the platform level remind me a lot of what you might see on the Chicago L for example. Now lines two and three have 70 stations between them and nearly 100 kilometers of track which is really impressive for just two metro lines. What's more is that combined they move over a million people a year which is an incredibly respectable number for an entire system much less just two lines. Now of course while I don't necessarily think that monorail is the best choice for any given transit system I do think that these two lines are a great example of how service is the most important thing. Connecting transit is important and the technology you choose is important but if you provide a high quality service all of those things are secondary. Of course there are other big potential takeaways here one of them could be that Chinese metro systems aren't also boring using the same types of trains some of them are quite wacky as we see with the CRT. At the same time I think these monorail lines are iconic to an extent that not many transit systems are they look incredible winding through buildings yes buildings along hillsides and over gigantic bridges and there's something that I really personally associate visually with the city they're located in something that not every transit system can say about itself. Speaking of monorails probably the most famous unique transit system in the world is the suspended monorail in Wuppertal Germany. This 13 kilometer 20 stop system is really interesting and is actually really old as well. Now monorails are rare but suspended monorails are even more rare and this system can teach us a lot. For one the lines alignment over the river whooper well not always being the greatest can teach us a lot about how things like waterways can be used for transit alignments in moderation. I think it's also super interesting to see how the Wuppertal monorail has been modernized a lot of older historic transit systems are left to be historic and not necessarily made modern with the times but that's not true of this system which has new trains that have air conditioning regenerative braking and as we discussed in a previous video they even feature modern ETCS signaling. From Germany we head all the way to Australia for our next system and if you're from Australia you might be able to guess what it is. I remember first hearing about this railway years and years ago and being fascinated with it and it's pretty great. It's the ski tube. Now the ski tube with tube in its name is a bit like a metro system. It features a tube-shaped tunnel that is probably one of the oldest transit tunnels built with a tunnel boring machine out there being built in the late 1980s. It's also got decidedly metro or subway style looking cars. If you squint and look at the trains they do kind of look like an American subway train but of course it's the ski tube not just the tube and so what makes it unique? Well it allows people to access a number of ski areas in the Australian Alps and yes indeed you can ski in Australia. Now climbing along its eight and a half kilometer three station line is not so simple and so the ski tube actually makes use of a rack railway system. A rack railway is essentially a system where there is a cog on the bottom of the train and there is a set of teeth or rack between the train tracks and what this allows is for the train to pull itself up the hill even when friction between the wheels and the rails is insufficient. Now the ski tube is also quite unique because its rolling stock is super weird. As I mentioned before it kind of looks like a subway train and it is super wide but the cars are also super unique in their door layout. There are six doors on each side of each car but they're single doors very unusual. Now speaking of snowy environments our next system is in Japan the northern city of Sapporo to be more specific. Now you see Sapporo like Montreal, Paris and Santiago uses rubber-tired trains for its metro but this creates a problem since there's a lot of snow in Sapporo and the rubber-tired trains aren't designed to work in the snow they had to come up with a solution to build outlines in less dense areas. Now if we were talking about Montreal the whole system might just be tunnels but in Sapporo they got very wise with their design and instead of tunneling the whole system they brought the outside in. What they did was instead of building tunnels everywhere they built some elevated sections of the network and then simply enclosed them in giant white tubes. These giant white tubes keep snow off the tracks and keep the metro sealed in and they also see mostly blend into the city's landscape at least during winter during summer onto the next one. And if you thought that you had heard it all when it comes to snowy alpine transit systems well not quite. Perhaps the most unusual rail system I've ever seen is the Yuban surf house in Austria. This is a 1.3 kilometer four station line which features a train pulled by a cable. Now the surface pattern is one of the things that's kind of unique about this system. While there are four stations during a lot of the time only two of them receive regular service and two of the stations are served in the peak direction only. Since this line mainly serves people who are skiing in the morning the intermediate stations will pick you up going uphill and in the afternoon the intermediate stations will drop you off going downhill. Now this line is quite unusual because despite being cable pulled its trains still feature overhead wire power and you might be wondering why and the reason is that instead of running on wheels or rails or anything conventional that you might imagine this system uses hovercraft technology. Indeed the Yuban surf house has a number of compressors and the like on board which allow it to ride on a cushion of air through a tunnel essentially on a concrete floor. The system also features very narrow trains and platform screen doors so it's all around just very weird. One unique metro system everyone always wants me to talk about is the Glasgow subway and it will be getting a full explained video in the future so make sure to stay tuned for that. The Glasgow subway is a proper mass transit system with 10 kilometers of track and 15 stations. It's also among the oldest in the world and like the tube in London features very interesting tube shaped trains. That being said the tubes on the Glasgow subway are much smaller than the trains in London and it operates on a narrow four foot gauge. What's interesting though is that kind of like in Whoppertall the Glasgow subway is getting upgraded. It's going to be getting new trains which are fully interconnected despite the tiny space that's being worked with which is a great thing to bring up if your city has small trains and uses as an excuse that they can't be fully interconnected. At the same time the system is going to be upgraded to have platform screen doors and most likely automated trains as well. Something which once again shows that even the very strange or unusual system can be upgraded to the most modern standards. Now as it turns out the new trains are actually being built by Stadler who I talked about in my recent video about Ottawa's new trains and as it turns out Stadler is involved with a couple of the rail systems on this video. They're really experts in building unique or unusual or bespoke trains and so it's kind of cool to see how they modernize the Glasgow subway. Now what is today's final unique railway? Well it's kind of my favorite unique railway Leon Line C. Now you might imagine as a line of a metro in a major city like Leon, Line C probably isn't anything too unusual and you would be wrong. The line is around two and a half kilometers long with five stops and part of its route took over a former funicular making it incredibly steep. In order to solve this problem as a metro line, Leon Line C adopts rack railway technology not unlike the ski tube in Australia. What's even more unique though is that the line actually features a station which is on an incline a 17 percent incline that is making it probably the steepest metro station in the world and one that I really wouldn't want to be waiting on on a rainy day. I find this line so strange because I can imagine getting on it and saying this looks like a pretty normal metro system and next thing you know be sliding down the train because you're going up a super steep hill. It's just unusual stuff. But with all of that said I want to hear from you. What are your favorite unique railways in the world? Let me know in the comments down below. And of course as always thanks for watching.