Testing process may have led to excessive monorail wear

Stephen Curran

Thursday, Feb. 3, 2005 | 9:44 a.m.

The lengthy recommissioning process that brought the Las Vegas Monorail back up to speed in December may have contributed to the greater-than-expected wear that kept the system closed for more than 13 hours Wednesday, county engineers said.

The $650 million monorail reopened to paying passengers about 7:45 p.m. Wednesday with four of its nine trains on the tracks. Monorail officials had shut the system's doors to passengers early that morning when technicians noticed a 30-foot electric rail used to power the electric trains had short-circuited, monorail spokesman Todd Walker said.

By 8 this morning normal operations had resumed, he said.

"It's as if nothing had happened the day before," Walker said.

The monorail company had been awaiting a report from Bombardier Inc., the Canadian firm that built and operates the system, detailing what caused the failure, he said.

Engineers of the Clark County Building Division, which has direct oversight of the monorail, said Wednesday afternoon that excessive wear appeared to cause a moving train to strip two small pieces of metal used to cover the rail earlier that morning, said Antonio Garcia, the county's mechanical engineer in charge of the monorail.

Workers preparing to open the system noticed the problem about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, about half an hour before the seven monorail stations opened their doors to the public. Bombardier engineers had initially expected to reopen the system by 9 that morning, although that estimate changed throughout the day as the investigation continued.

The system is normally open from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. each day.

Walker said the longer-than-expected repair process allowed crews to do some preventive maintenance and that the technicians will continue to keep checking for similar problems.

"This is not unusual at all," he said. "These spots will be looked at on a regular basis, and it'll become a part of a checklist that they need to go through."

The employees on Wednesday also found a highly worn patch near the slightly curved section of track on Paradise Road south of Karen Avenue where the short-circuit occurred, Garcia said. A closer review found that the area may have been weakened by the extensive testing process required of the monorail before the county agency would allow it to reopen from its most recent closure, said county building official Ron Lynn.

The unanticipated finding has prompted engineers to call for more frequent reviews of that part of the elevated track, he said.

All told, the building division required the trains to log more than 19,000 trouble-free miles combined before the system was allowed to carry passengers again on Dec. 24.

"It was an extensive recommissioning process," Lynn said. "Probably from beginning to end it triggered a wear pattern more reflective of a year's operation."

Exact ridership numbers for Wednesday evening were not available, although Walker said the trains may have run mostly empty much of the night.

Lynn said the system could have continued running Wednesday morning, although technicians would likely have noted a small electrical spike on monitors in the automated control center.

Instead, the monorail company opted to remove each of train from service while the problem was investigated, a move Lynn said was wise given previous troubles with the automated trains.

"It's to their benefit to go out there and investigate to learn about the system to adjust their maintenance schedule," he said.

Wednesday's was the second closure since the monorail reopened on Dec. 24. Human error was blamed for a Jan. 5 incident, which prompted monorail officials to evacuated passengers from the system for about 20 minutes after a Bombardier technician apparently failed to adequately reset a door mechanism. The mechanism had been interrupted when a passenger blocked a door leading from the elevated train to the platform outside the Sahara.

The three and a half month closure last year came after several 6-inch-wide washers fell from a moving train Sept. 8. That closure came less than a day after it reopened from a six-day shutdown that began when a 60-pound wheel assembly fell from another moving train the week before.

No one was injured in either incident.