It’s a strange move to have monorail cars installed in an office building, but Google has done this in its Sydney offices, and the story behind the idea is an amusing one.
An engineer at Google, Paul Cowan, jokingly requested for the company to buy the decommissioned Sydney Monorail cars to use as a shuttle between its two office buildings—the single-loop Sydney Monorail was closed in June 2013 after being in operation for about 25 years. Cowan submitted his request to Google’s internal ticketing system.
It turns out that the technology giant is good at granting wishes—the crazy idea was eventually approved, and the monorails were purchased and installed. Although they can’t zip around and provide actual transport, they function as unorthodox meeting rooms, complete with air-conditioning and television sets.
The abandoned carriages were crane-lifted into the Google offices through their second-storey windows, and the installation process cost Google an estimated $250,000. Well, at least the iconic monorail cars won’t be sitting in a junkyard somewhere.
Watch a short clip on the installation process below:
[via The Next Web]