computer business. For a railroad project connecting California with Alaska, he got in touch with Glenn Hagen, previously an engineer with Northrop Aircraft, who had founded Logistics Research in Redondo Beach outside Los Angeles, developing computers based on magnetic drum memory. In November 1952, Wenner-Gren helped the company to incorporate. He soon controlled the company and renamed it ALWAC (the Axel L. Wenner-Gren Automatic Computer). ALWAC I was used in 1953, ALWAC II and ALWAC III in 1954, ALWAC III-E in 1955. In 1956 and 1957, the model ALWAC III-E was considered a competitor to the IBM 650, having fewer parts and good economy, but no more than 30 units seem to have been delivered. Soon after this, magnetic drum machines were made obsolete by the introduction of the magnetic core memory. By 1956 the number of employees tripled to over 300 and the company was relocated to an industrial park in Hawthorne, California. The appearance of the transistor in the electronics industry in 1957 was a financial shock for all vacuum tube computer makers and by 1958 ALWAC in Hawthorne closed and its employees, with the help of Wenner-Gren himself, were successfully hired by Litton Industries and Autonetics and several smaller electronics companies. The follow-up ALWAC 800 was a failed design that never went beyond prototype, using not only core memory but also magnetic logic (a combination of semiconductor diodes and magnetic cores, cf. Hewitt Crane), and presold contracts nearly ruined the company. Development was transferred to Sweden in 1958. The next model, named Wegematic 1000, a slight upgrade of the III-E, was shipped in 1960. Only a dozen were delivered and half of them were give-aways to universities, including one unit for the Weizmann Institute in Israel. In exchange, Wenner-Gren received several honorary titles. Among Wenner-Gren's other interests were monorail train systems. His company, ALWEG, built the original Disneyland Monorail System in 1959 and the Seattle Center Monorail in 1962. Wenner-Gren continued his fascination with speculative railway projects, as he collaborated with Canadian W.A.C. Bennett to build a railway north from Prince George into the untapped Peace River, Rocky Mountain Trench and eventually Alaska. Parts of the railway were built by the Pacific Great Eastern Railway after Wenner-Gren's death, including the needless Fort Nelson branch, yet the meeting produced outcomes lasting to this day. The interest in the north spurred a spate of mega-industrial projects in the region: