Monorail safety drills wrapping up

Stephen Curran

Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2004 | 8:33 a.m.

The Las Vegas Monorail could be within days of reopening, but before it can legally start carrying passengers again, the trains must be ready for a string of possible glitches that now includes pieces falling from the elevated track.

Another battery of tests to "recommission" the $650 million system ended Monday afternoon after a week of trouble-free testing, Ron Lynn, the county Building Official, said. Those tests required the trains to operate free of glitches and without any emergency alarms being triggered for between 1,000 and 2,000 eight-mile roundtrips.

"We're days away from the system reopening," Todd Walker, a spokesman for the monorail company, said.

The process now under way, a series of scenarios similar to tests the trains passed before the system opened July 15, could be complete this afternoon, Lynn said.

All told, the trains will have logged about 19,000 miles combined before reopening, he said.

The scenario testing, a series of fire drills, planned computer glitches and problems with the automated doors, allows engineers to plan for a string of mishaps that could hobble the monorail. The drills are identical to those the system passed before it opened July 15, except the county added a plan to accommodate driveshafts and other pieces of the trains' undercarriages that may fall off, Lynn said.

The tests, which forced some trains to run backwards as part of emergency procedures, continued this morning.

"We will keep going through the scenarios until such time as we're sure the trains are running as they should," Lynn said.

By Tuesday afternoon, all but one train had passed the recommissioning tests. The other, Walker said, was used to compare the previous driveshaft alignment to the modified one.

The monorail closed Sept. 8 after a six-inch-wide washer fell from a moving train. It was the second malfunction to force the system's closure since its high-profile opening, after a series of problems caused a delay of more than six months.

Engineers from the county, Bombardier, the Canadian firm that built and operates the trains, and two oversight consultants, have pinpointed the cause of the problems as a misaligned driveshaft that caused a series of harsh vibrations that loosened both the 60-pound wheel assembly that caused the first closure and the washer that has kept the trains closed to the public for more than three months.

The falling wheel assembly kept the privately financed system closed six days.

Lynn said the engineering team on Tuesday appeared to have reached a consensus about the cause of the problems, although a formal report from Exponent, a consulting firm hired by the monorail company, has not yet reached the county.

Without that report, the only such document still not submitted to the county, the system can not reopen, Lynn said.

"We still have not received that written report," he said. "We can't release the train without it."

Lynn and monorail spokesman Walker attributed the delay in the yet-unseen report to a bureaucratic slow-down in the large consulting firm.

Exponent executives told Lynn to expect the final report later today or Thursday, the county official said. He will then distribute it to county engineers for their review.

Lynn said he did not know how long the review of Exponent's report would take.

Monorail and county officials had been tight-lipped about when riders can expect to board the trains. Both men have said it is possible the system will reopen for the New Year's Eve holiday weekend, when the Las Vegas Valley is expected to have more than 200,000 visitors.