Circus Circus building sleek people mover at Tropicana

Monday, Oct. 19, 1998 | 11:50 a.m.

Circus Circus Enterprises Inc. will build a half-mile elevated shuttle system that will move people from Tropicana Avenue to the company's soon-to-open Mandalay Bay hotel-casino.

A project consultant said the five-car Mandalay Bay shuttle will be the sleekest and most attractive system in the city.

Parallel tracks will run along the front of Circus Circus' three properties south of Tropicana Avenue -- the Excalibur, Luxor and Mandalay Bay. The southbound shuttle will be an express line directly to Mandalay Bay while the northbound train will make a stop at Luxor before continuing to the street corner -- which has the largest number of hotel rooms in the world.

Circus Circus officials would not say how much the system will cost.

Consultant Andrew Jakes, founder of Jakes Associates Inc., San Jose, Calif., said the system will be built and operational in time for Mandalay Bay's spring opening, which would make it the fastest mass transportation system ever built.

The black trains "will look like the German high-speed trains" with a steel-pipe guideway system and "a quality that Las Vegas has never before seen."

Jakes has worked on every major people-moving system in Las Vegas including the new tram link between the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo.

Companies in Switzerland and Austria are designing the trains and the guideway system.

"It will look like a monorail, but it isn't," Jakes said. "It will look fast, but there isn't enough distance to build any speed."

The Doppelmayr Group, the Swiss company designing the train, listed the speed at about 22 mph. The company said capacity for the system is about 3,200 passengers per hour in each direction.

Doppelmayr calls the system a "Cable Liner," a system that propels the train with a moving cable. Other people-moving systems in Las Vegas use similar technology, which works with the same principles as San Francisco's cable car system. One of the biggest advantages is that they can be operated without a driver on board.

The two cable drive systems will be housed at Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue and Doppelmayr said the mechanisms will be insulated to keep noise to a minimum. Clark County planners say the tram station at Tropicana will be connected to the pedestrian overpasses at the intersection.