Epcot

Epcot is the second of four theme parks built at Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida, near the city of Orlando. It opened as EPCOT Center (Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow) on October 1, 1982, and spans 300 acres (120 ha), more than twice the size of the Magic Kingdom park. It is dedicated to the celebration of human achievement, namely technological innovation and international culture, and is often referred to as a "permanent World's Fair." In 2014, the park hosted approximately 11.45 million guests, ranking it the third most visited theme park in North America and the sixth most visited theme park in the world. The park is represented by Spaceship Earth, a geodesic sphere that also serves as an attraction. Epcot was known as EPCOT Center until 1994, when it was later renamed Epcot '94, then Epcot '95, now commonly known simply as Epcot.

Dedication

The theme park opened on October 1, 1982. The dedication plaque near the entrance states:

Epcot Center is inspired by Walt Disney's creative genius. Here, human achievements are celebrated through imagination, the wonders of enterprise, and concepts of a future that promises new and exciting benefits for all.

Walt Disney World Monorail System

The Walt Disney World Monorail System is a public transit monorail system in operation at the Walt Disney World Resort. The Walt Disney World Resort currently operates twelve Mark VI monorail trains on three lines of service. The monorail system opened in 1971 with two routes (Magic Kingdom: Resort and Express) and with Mark IV monorail trains. It was expanded to three lines (Magic Kingdom: Resort and Express, plus Epcot) in 1982, and the rolling stock was updated to Mark VI trains in 1989.

As of 2013, the system is one of the most heavily used monorail systems in the world with over 150,000 daily riders, surpassed only by the monorail system run by Chongqing Rail Transit in Chongqing, China, which holds the record for the world's busiest monorail system with over 500,000 riders per day on average on Line 3 alone.

Lines, stations, and infrastructure

The Walt Disney World Monorail operates over a span of 14.7 miles (23.7 km), with around 50 million Disney guests traveling on the monorail each year. The system opened with the rest of the Walt Disney World Resort on October 1, 1971. It initially featured four stations: the Transportation and Ticket Center, Disney's Polynesian Resort, the Magic Kingdom and Disney's Contemporary Resort. The Epcot line and station were added during that park's construction, opening on October 1, 1982. The most recent addition was the Grand Floridian station, which was opened in 1988 along with the resort hotel.

EPCOT (concept)

The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) was an unfinished concept developed by Walt Disney. Its purpose was to be a "real city that would 'never cease to be a blueprint of the future,'" designed to stimulate American corporations to come up with new ideas for urban living. This was part of Walt Disney's original plan for the property purchased near Orlando, Florida, but after his death in 1966, the property became the Walt Disney World Resort in 1971 and a theme park based on the idea opened in 1982. A portion of the original architectural model of the concept can be viewed on the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover in the Magic Kingdom.

History

In the early 1960s, entertainment industry magnate Walt Disney, who by this time had many grandchildren, began to worry about the future of the world they would inhabit. He worried especially about modern cities, which were hectic, disorganized, dirty, and crime-ridden, a far cry from his clean and controlled Disneyland Park in California. Realizing that what he and his Imagineers had learned in the development of Disneyland could be put to use in planning communities, and perhaps even cities, Disney began to immerse himself in books about city planning, such as Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow. Around the same time, Disney had given the East Coast a glimpse of his style of entertainment, with the four pavilions he developed for the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. The success of these exhibitions convinced him that the time was right for an "East Coast Disneyland". (See Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, Carousel of Progress, It's A Small World) However, Disney did not want simply to build a second Disneyland. He wanted to create something entirely different: a community for people to live in.