No reopening in sight for monorail

Stephen Curran

Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004 | 9:35 a.m.

The Las Vegas Monorail, out of service since an industrial-sized washer fell from a moving train last month, remains closed with no re-opening date in sight, county inspectors said Monday.

The Clark County Building Division, which has authority over the monorail, is still conducting a series of tests to determine what caused the washer, which is used to secure the drive shaft, to fall off.

No one was injured in the Sept. 8 incident, in which the two-pound washer fell about 25 feet near the Bally's/Paris platform.

It is the second long-term closure since the system opened to the public July 15, after a string of glitches pushed back the opening date more than six months. The first closure, which occurred less than a week before the washer fell off, was prompted by a 60-pound wheel assembly that fell from a moving train and lasted six days.

The washer, with a 6-inch diameter, was part of a flange system used to secure the drive shaft. A bolt held in place by the washer also broke, but the flange kept the drive shaft from falling again.

Ron Lynn, the Clark County building official, said engineers with the county and the monorail's Canadian builder, Bombardier Inc., have positioned sophisticated sensors used to measure structural weaknesses throughout the nine monorail cars but have not arrived at a conclusive cause of the failures.

Todd Walker, a spokesman for the monorail, was unavailable for comment Monday but said Friday that there is no target date for re-opening.

The county has put one full-time engineer on the project and another five who work on a part-time basis, Lynn said.

Transit System Management, the company that runs the monorail, will be billed $75 an hour for each engineer who inspects the trains, Lynn had said.

Previous estimates have put the monorail's losses at about $85,000 in ticket sales each day the system is closed.

Monorail officials have also enlisted Exponent, a third-party safety consulting firm, to investigate the problems.

Engineers working on the project are reluctant to speculate on when the system could be ready again, as possible fixes could create entirely new safety scenarios, Dave Durkee, the county's principal engineer on the project, said.

"Every single change that is made has another consequent effect on the system," Durkee said. "There's no sense fixing one component if you're going to break another component. That's the state that we're in right now."