Final monorail testing could begin next week

Stephen Curran

Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2004 | 9:38 a.m.

A final battery of tests that will determine when the beleaguered Las Vegas Monorail will re-open for public service could begin as early as next week, Clark County's top building official said Tuesday.

Representatives from the Transit Systems Management, the for-profit parent of the Las Vegas Monorail Co., were expected to meet with the county Building Division this morning to begin planning for when they will begin a required "recommissioning" period to check for any remaining glitches in the system, Cam Walker, president of Transit Systems Management, said.

Walker, reciting what has become a common phrase for monorail officials, said there is no definite timeframe for the system's re-opening.

"(Today's meeting) is really the opportunity to understand the steps to meet their requirements," he said. "It's somewhat premature to jump ahead of the elements they want to put in place."

That open-ended period will require the trains to run along the 4-mile route from the MGM Grand to the Sahara hotel thousands of times, mirroring normal system use, Ron Lynn, the Clark County Building Official, said.

Depending on how soon the county agency deems the problem solved, the system could still re-open before the year's end, he said.

"There is still a possibility it could open by the end of the year," Lynn said. "But it still could happen at any time."

Cam Walker and Todd Walker, a spokesman for the monorail, said it was "premature" to speculate on when the system could re-open.

Six monorail trains have been running 20 hours a day along the elevated track since earlier this week to test modifications made to the trains' driveshafts, Cam Walker said.

Independent tests conducted by Bombardier and Exponent, the third-party oversight firm hired to examine the system, had pinpointed a misaligned drive shaft as the culprit for the three-month closure that started when a heavy duty washer fell from a moving train Sept. 8, Lynn said.

The drive shafts, which have since been realigned at a different angle, caused a series of harsh vibrations that caused pieces of equipment to come loose, he said.

"All of those (the angle of the drive shafts, the speed of the trains and the resulting vibrations) worked in concert to put undue stress on the drive shaft," Lynn said. "It would have worked perfectly fine at a different profile or a different speed."

Lynn stopped short of calling the problems the result of an inherent design flaw, instead saying they were "unanticipated failures."

The Building Division, which has oversight over the monorail's safety, on Tuesday received a written report from Bombardier Inc. detailing what engineers with that company say caused two heavy pieces of equipment to fall from moving trains within a week of each other.

The county has also received periodic verbal reports from Exponent that confirmed Bombardier's conclusion, Lynn said.

The problem that left the trains shuttered for three months occurred less than one week after a 60-pound wheel assembly fell from a moving train, prompting the system's first closure. That closure lasted six days.

It is the second long-term closure since the trains opened for public service July 15, after a string of glitches pushed back the opening date more than six months, during which time a drive shaft fell from a moving train over an enclosed area.

The incident was unrelated to the most recent closure, Todd Walker said.

Monorail officials have previously estimated the system loses $85,000 a day in ticket sales each day, which equates to more than $7.5 million in losses to date.

Cam Walker said the most recent closure has been longer than the monorail company anticipated but that it will not impact its financial viability.

The losses are one part of a string of financial challenges the monorail company has faced. Last month, Moody's Investors Service placed the company on a rating watch, meaning the company's $451 million in bonds were in danger of being downgraded to junk status.

The Moody's warning followed a previous warning from Fitch Ratings, which also placed the company's bonds at its lowest investment-grade category.

Bombardier also saw its bonds lowered to junk status after the high-profile bankruptcy filing of US Airways in September, a move the company has said did not impact its Las Vegas operations.

So far, each of Bombardier's 75 Las Vegas employees have kept their jobs, and none of Transit System Management's 17 employees have been laid off, Cam Walker said.

"This is longer than I expected, but as we laid down a process in the beginning that we were not going to re-open until we were sure it was safe," he said. "We're not going to shortcut that process. ... We are responsible to the bondholders and we must hold in high regard our responsibility but that was not the focus. We're dealing with a community in which we and others live. We want to instill confidence in the system."