“Before entre­pre­neurs in Seat­tle won fame sell­ing com­put­er soft­ware or take­out cof­fee across the globe, the city’s vision of Cen­tu­ry 21 soared on mono­rails,” writes Mike Lin­blom for the Seat­tle Times.

“Elvis rode the ele­vat­ed train here dur­ing the 1962 World’s Fair, as did 8 mil­lion oth­er vis­i­tors. The Ger­man-built rail cars, whoosh­ing on pneu­mat­ic tires from Seat­tle Cen­ter to down­town, demon­strat­ed how peo­ple might tran­scend sur­face traf­fic jams in the future.”

A pub­lic cel­e­bra­tion is under­way today, March 29, at Seat­tle Cen­ter Sta­tion to mark the 60th anniver­sary of open­ing day, March 24, 1962.

The arti­cle includes more his­to­ry of the mono­rail as well as insight into the cur­rent state of the mono­rail in a rapid­ly grow­ing city in a rapid­ly grow­ing region. There is a new bun­dle of mon­ey head­ed to the mono­rail for sta­tion upgrades, for exam­ple, as the sys­tem is pop­u­lar among fans of the Seat­tle Krak­en MLS club.

“State law­mak­ers pro­vid­ed an ini­tial $5 mil­lion toward sta­tion upgrades in the new $17 bil­lion Move Ahead Wash­ing­ton pack­age, and the mono­rail receives peri­od­ic train-main­te­nance grants by the Fed­er­al Tran­sit Admin­is­tra­tion,” reports Lind­blom. “That fol­lows $7 mil­lion pri­vate funds spent last year on ren­o­va­tions, main­ly by the arena’s own­ers.”