If you factor in all costs (beams, concrete, electricity, metalwork, labor, construction expenses, new platforms, new employees, and of course new Monorails), the projected cost PER MILE (yes, PER MILE!) of additional track would be approximately $20,000,000.
I just got back from a stay at the Contemporary, and I really appreciated the monorail service. It would definitely be a benefit if it could be extended to Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom, but monorails are apparently the most expensive form of public transportation, for whatever reason. But I wonder: Could the monorail track be retrofitted to accommodate modern light-rail cars? I realize "The Walt Disney World Light Rail System" doesn't carry the same connotation of wonder and futurism that the monorail does now, but could it then be more easily maintained, upgraded and expanded?
20 Million is nothing and if that's all it would take to build the track then they would be all over it.
I don't think anyone has any real idea how much it would cost (at least not on here anyway)
The numbers would have to be easily well into the hundreds of millions of dollars, who knows it wouldn't surprise me if it would be 1 - 2 billion dollars and i'm just pulling that number out of thin air.
There is more than just the expense involved holding the monorail system back. A good portion of the WDW acreage is not suitable for the weight of the monorail track. The soil is soft and marshy, and a good chunk qualifies as wetlands and comes under environmental regulations.
We were told a story by a CM years ago that they started to lay track to the AK, but part of it sunk into the ground so the idea was abandoned. I remember laughing off the story, thinking that surely pre-construction testing would have prevented something like that. But recently in Tampa a newly built section of elevated highway collapsed because the support beams vanished into the ground, so maybe the story isn't so crazy after all!