Monorail officials encouraged about timing of system tests

Stephen Curran

Thursday, Dec. 9, 2004 | 9:52 a.m.

Las Vegas Monorail executives left a meeting with the Clark County Building Division on Wednesday "encouraged" about when a final battery of tests to re-open the trouble-prone system could begin, a company spokesman said.

Company leaders met with Ron Lynn, the Clark County building official and county engineers, Wednesday morning to start planning for a government-ordered "recommissioning" period that will test the trains before they are allowed to start shuttling paying passengers again.

The recommissioning period, will likely begin sometime next week, depending on what preliminary tests of improvements to the trains' undercarriages expected to continue through this weekend turn up, Dave Durkee, the county's principal engineer on the monorail, said.

"Next week is a real number," he said of when the recommissioning may begin. "But the one thing about recommissioning is that if we have a setback we have to start again, but the trains are running good now."

The trains will have to make 1,000 8-mile roundtrips, meaning they will have to run trouble-free for more than 8,000 miles, before engineers will allow the monorail to re-open, Durkee said. That process will likely take five to eight days.

Monorail technicians began running six of the trains earlier this week and expect to add a seventh Sunday, to equal the number that would run under normal circumstances, Todd Walker, a spokesman for the monorail, said.

If those tests go off without a hitch, the system could still re-open by the end of the year, he said.

Walker would not estimate when the system would re-open.

"We're working with county officials and will work with them on a regular basis," he said.

Even then, the system will face tighter scrutiny than other people movers on the Strip, Durkee said. The line that connects the Excalibur resort to the Mandalay Bay, for example, undergoes county inspections twice a year. The monorail will be tested by T.J. Krobe, a third-party firm hired by the county but paid for by the monorail company, monthly, he said.

The trains must then run trouble-free for three months before the monorail can return to quarterly inspections, then twice a year, like the Mandalay Bay monorail project, Durkee said.

"It's all assuming it becomes a more reliable system," Durkee said. "The train's pretty honest. It records every alarm and every error."

Wednesday's meeting was the first of a series of communications expected between the monorail company and the county detailing the results of an investigation into the system's driveshafts, Walker said.

Engineers from Bombardier, the Canadian firm that built and operates the trains, and Exponent, the third-party oversight company hired to examine the system, had pinpointed the problem as stemming from a misaligned driveshaft, Lynn said.

The driveshaft glitch, which caused a series of harsh vibrations to loosen components connected to the driveshaft, is responsible for the three-month closure, monorail officials said. The system was closed Sept. 8 after a heavy duty washer fell from a moving train.

Engineers from Bombardier and the monorail company presented final reports to the county at Wednesday's meeting. Exponent, which has provided periodic verbal and written updates, has not presented their final report, Durkee said.

"Re-opening is contingent on us receiving a written copy of their report," Durkee, who attributed the delay to bureaucratic hang-ups in the large engineering firm. "They seemed pretty frank and pretty honest about the test results."

The problem that forced the closure was the second such malfunction since the trains opened for public service July 15. Various problems pushed the opening of the system back more than six months.

The most recent closure occurred less than a week after the trains re-opened from its first multi-day closure, which began after a 60-pound wheel assembly fell from a moving train. No one was injured in either incident.

The series of problems that has hit the monorail company in the checkbook. Monorail officials have estimated the system loses $85,000 a day in ticket sales, meaning the company has lost more than $7.5 million to date.

So far, no one has been laid off, officials from the monorail and Bombardier said.