Misplaced Pages

#751248

18-603: The Ultra Low Floor tram (ULF) is a low-floor tram operating in Vienna , Austria , and Oradea , Romania , built by a consortium composed of Siemens and ELIN in Vienna. It has the lowest floor-height of any such vehicle. In contrast to other low-floor trams, the floor in the interior of ULF is at sidewalk height (about 20 cm or 7.9 inches above the road surface), which makes access to trams easy for passengers in wheelchairs or with baby carriages. This configuration required

36-565: A loose horse at a racetrack outside Paris . A year later, eighteen-year-old Ida Goyette stumbled on an Erie Canal bridge while wearing a hobble skirt, fell over the railing, and drowned. To prevent women from splitting their skirts, some women wore a fetter or tied their legs together at the knee. Some designers made alterations to the hobble skirt to allow for greater movement. Jeanne Paquin concealed pleats in her hobble skirts while other designers such as Lucile offered slit or wrap skirts. The trend began to decline in popularity at

54-527: A new undercarriage. The axles had to be replaced by a complex electronic steering of the traction motors . Auxiliary devices are installed largely under the car's roof. The ULF technology went into testing in the early 1990s. Since 1998, ULFs have been in use on Vienna's tram network . As of mid-2008, 302 cars were in operation (150 cars since mid-2006, and another 152 as of 2007). Siemens ULF trams were introduced in Oradea , Romania , on 24 April 2008, and are

72-483: A ride and became the first American woman to fly as a passenger in an airplane, soaring for two minutes and seven seconds. She tied a rope securely around her skirt at her ankles to keep it from blowing in the wind during the flight. According to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum , a French fashion designer was inspired by the way Mrs. Berg walked away from the aircraft with her skirt still tied and created

90-651: A unique appearance compared to any other trams running at the time, they earned a number of nicknames, including hobble skirt cars, public welfare cars, and sow bellies. Typical floor heights of low-floor trams are 300 to 350 mm (11.8 to 13.8 in), and the Ultra Low Floor tram has a floor height of only 180 mm (7.1 in). For comparison high-floor trams are typically more than 600 mm (23.6 in) and rapid transit using heavy rail trains has floor heights of 800 to 1,200 mm (31.5 to 47.2 in). Hobble skirt A hobble skirt

108-554: Is desirable, while others, particularly new systems, may not have the space to site high-level platforms in urban centres. Trams traditionally had high floors, and articulated tram designs evolved with low-floor centre sections. Examples of this design are Amsterdam 11G/12G-trams and the Kusttrams in Belgium . The most common design of 100% low floor vehicles is the multi-articulated design. This uses short carbody sections for

126-487: The "speed-limit skirt." There were several reports of women competing in hobble-skirt races as a joke. Boarding a streetcar in a hobble skirt was difficult. In 1912, the New York Street Railway ran hobble-skirt cars with no step up. Los Angeles introduced similar streetcars in 1913. Hobble skirts were directly responsible for several deaths. In 1910, a hobble-skirt-wearing woman was killed by

144-427: The 1950s sheath skirt's new waist-to-hem tightness, said to reveal the shape of the leg, still created problems of mobility, with split seams a familiar occurrence. Nonetheless, they were widely promoted by designers and the fashion industry, their narrowness exaggerated even more by having models pose with one leg directly in front of the other. Some other skirt styles of the time also had very narrow hems, particularly

162-414: The beginning of World War I , as the skirt's limited mobility did not suit the wartime atmosphere. The next time skirts would be narrow enough to impede movement would be with the sheath skirts of the 1950s, first introduced at the end of the 1940s. Though shorter lengths (from just below the knee to the lower calf) and advances in fabric would enable a little more movement than in the hobble-skirt era,

180-589: The hobble skirt based on her ingenuity. The French fashion designer in the Berg story might have been Paul Poiret who claimed credit for the hobble skirt, but it is not clear whether the skirt was his invention or not. Skirts had been rapidly narrowing since the mid-1900s. Slim skirts were economical because they used less fabric. The hobble skirt became popular just as women were becoming more physically active. Hobble skirts inspired hundreds of cartoons and comic postcards. One series of comic cards called it

198-404: The knee-length puffball/pouf skirts shown by Pierre Cardin , Yves Saint Laurent , and others from 1957 to 1960. A few of Saint Laurent's 1959 skirts were so narrow at the hem that some fashion writers revived the word "hobble" to refer to them. Sheath skirts remained part of the fashion picture into the early 1960s and then went very much out of style with the rise of the flared miniskirts of

SECTION 10

#1732791911752

216-498: The low-floor centre section. North American light rail type vehicles frequently have a similar configuration but with a centre bogie designed to accommodate a low floor situated under a short centre section. In Vienna, Ultra Low Floor (ULF) Trams can "kneel" at the curbside, reducing the height from the road to only 180 mm (7.1 in). Some public transport companies have both low floor and high floor trams. They report that low floor trams have 15% higher maintenance costs for

234-408: The mid- to late sixties and the easy, comfortable clothes of the 1970s. Toward the end of the seventies, beginning in fall of 1978, some designers began reviving the narrow skirt silhouettes of decades past. Initially, many of them allowed some movement via slits, though not always. Some were so inhibiting that the word hobble was once again used to describe them. When the tight silhouette of

252-754: The new design, pivoting bogies could only be used under high floors, hence such trams could only be part low-floor, with high-floor sections over the pivoting bogies. The idea of a low-floor tram dates back to the early 20th century when a number of trolley systems began experimenting with various "stepless" designs. Perhaps the most notable is the Hedley-Doyle Stepless car introduced in 1912 for use on Broadway in Manhattan . A number of other cities also purchased Hedley-Doyle Stepless trams after seeing their success in Manhattan. Since these cars had

270-441: The only ULF trams outside Austria. Low-floor tram A low-floor tram allows accessible level access from curb level platforms. Level access can also be achieved either by using a high-floor vehicle serving high-platform stops. Currently both types are in use, depending on the station platform infrastructure in existing rail systems. Some systems may make use of former railway alignments where use of existing high platforms

288-474: The rolling stock, and 20% higher maintenance costs for the infrastructure on average. Many low-floor trams have fixed bogies which increase track wear and tear, while decreasing the speed at which a tram can drive through a curve (usually 4–15 km/h (2.5–9.3 mph) in 20 m (66 ft) radius curve). The Škoda ForCity and the newest Alstom Citadis X04 try to counter the effect with pivoting bogies while maintaining 100% low floor design. Prior to

306-606: The wheels with longer sections between them. Examples of this are the Alstom Citadis and Combino . A different design was developed by MAN . In 1990 the GT6N was the first 100% low-floor tram. These trams are found in ten German cities (such as Bremen and Munich ) and in the Swedish city Norrköping . Other designs are only partially low floor, with high floors over the bogies at the outer ends and single axle bogies under

324-591: Was a skirt with a narrow enough hem to significantly impede the wearer's stride . It was called a "hobble skirt" because it seemed to hobble any woman as she walked. Hobble skirts were a short-lived fashion trend that peaked between 1908 and 1914. The hobble skirt may have been inspired by the Japanese kimono and by one of the first women to fly in an airplane . At a 1908 Wright Brothers demonstration in Le Mans , France, Mrs. Edith Ogilby Berg asked for

#751248