When Paul Cowan, an engineer at Google Australia, began noticing his company beginning to sprawl from building to building, he jokingly submitted a ticket to the building management team requesting that a monorail be installed between the buildings. After some back and forth, the support ticket more or less went viral inside Google. Here’s the full story on Cowan’s Google+ page.
As luck would have it, the Sydney Monorail had been shut down in June and the monorail cars were being sold. While Cowan’s employer didn’t buy the entire monorail and build his dream transportation system, it did buy two of the monorail cars for use as meeting spaces.
The Sydney Morning Herald has the following footage of one of the cars being installed.
The paper estimates that it cost Google around $250,000 (roughly $236,500 in U.S. dollars) just to move and install the cars, adding, “The carriages will be used for meeting rooms, and will have have air-conditioning and televisions installed.” Sounds like an okay deal, no?
The Next Web has more details of the backstory, along with the embedded YouTube video of time-lapse footage of the crane lifting the cars into the building:
[youtube=http://youtu.be/fARzyzbhUao]
Google Converts Sydney Monorail Into Office Space Because Why Not [Geekosystem]