Final battery of tests slated for LV Monorail

Stephen Curran

Monday, Dec. 13, 2004 | 10:55 a.m.

The final battery of tests that will determine if the Las Vegas Monorail reopens by the end of the year will likely begin Wednesday, Clark County's top building official said this morning.

County engineers continued inspecting eight of the system's nine trains through the weekend. The engineers were trying to see which trains will be ready to go ahead with the "recommissioning" process to prepare the trains to begin shuttling paying passengers again, Ron Lynn, the county building official, said.

Preliminary tests that continued over the weekend were mostly trouble-free, as seven trains were running without drivers or passengers on board, Lynn said.

By Friday afternoon, four of the normally automated monorail trains had been operating without drivers. Another two were operating with drivers, he said. One of the trains had not been approved to begin running.

The system is designed to have seven trains running during normal operation, monorail officials had said. Each car must pass inspection before it can run, Lynn said.

"We have no objection if they want to run fewer trains," he said. "Theoretically you could open with one train. You wouldn't make much money, but you could" operate the system that way.

To be ready for recommissioning, each train must run trouble-free and no emergency alarms can be triggered, Lynn said. Once the process begins, the system must operate without any glitches for between 1,000 and 2,000 eight-mile roundtrips, meaning the trains will have to log more than 8,000 trouble-free miles before they can re-open.

Engineers over the weekend faced a number of "Category 2" alarms, meaning the trains still faced glitches with the system's doors and lighting. The problems were minor and would not affect the trains' safety, Lynn said.

"They're not safety-related or operation-related to the structure (the trains)," Lynn said. "Any automation is going to have trouble. There's innumerable things that could occur."

Once recommissioning begins, Lynn said he did not know for sure how long the process would take, but had previously said it could be complete in five to eight days if trains operate without further problems.

The progress made over the weekend trumped previous estimates that said recommissioning was unlikely to begin by the end of this week, he said.

"They're in good shape," Lynn said. "They are on schedule. Getting all trains moving this weekend is the breakthrough they needed to get back up and running."

This week's tests will be the first of many in store for the $650 million system. Even when it re-opens, the trains will undergo monthly inspections by T.J. Krobe, a third-party firm hired by the county but billed to the monorail company, Lynn said.

Other people movers, including the tram that connects the Excalibur resort to the Mandalay Bay, face county inspections twice a year. The monorail will have to run trouble-free for three months before it can return to quarterly inspections, then twice a year, like the Mandalay Bay project, county engineers said.

Early indications Friday pointed to progress being made in the inspections, which continued last week without any significant problems, he said.

Todd Walker, a spokesman for the monorail, said he would not speculate as to when the system might re-open. All of the company officials have been tight-lipped about that subject.

"It (testing) could begin this week," he said. "That's all I'll say. Things don't always work perfectly."

Meanwhile county officials faulted technicians working for Bombardier, the Canadian firm that built and operates the trains, after the company failed to notify representatives from Lynn's office about a small bolt used to secure a Fiberglas panel that fell from a train in November.

The two-inch bolt, which he said weighed "a few ounces," was not related to the drivetrain problems that led to the three-month closure of the system.

Neither Bombardier nor the monorail company were cited in the incident, which Lynn said arose from a misunderstanding about county regulations that require any piece of equipment that falls from an overhead system be reported. No such rule exists for ground-level systems, he said.

The incident did not jeopardize the system's safety, Lynn said.

"We wouldn't even stop the train for this but we need it not to happen," he said. "I told them (Bombardier) they should make us aware of anything that falls off a train, no matter how minor it may be. It was not related to the safety of the train, but I wanted to make sure they knew."

Monorail executives met last week with the building division to present what engineers from Bombardier and Exponent, the oversight firm hired to examine the system, thought caused a six-inch-wide washer to fall from a moving train Sept. 8.

The glitch, which engineers said appeared to be caused by a series of harsh vibrations that loosened the component's connection to a driveshaft, left the system shuttered for more than three months.

That closure occurred less than a week after the trains re-opened from its first multi-day closure since a six-month delay pushed back the system's planned opening date to July 15. The first closure began after a 60-pound wheel assembly fell from another moving train.

No one was injured in either incident.