Glitch halts monorail in its tracks once again

Stephen Curran

Tuesday, May 3, 2005 | 11:03 a.m.

Clark County officials asked the Las Vegas Monorail to shut down regular operations this afternoon to try to fix a problem that has stranded passengers twice in the last two days.

The monorail will run this afternoon for about a half hour starting at 3:45 p.m. without passengers while technicians from Bombardier, the company that built the monorail, to try to isolate the glitch in the system.

The problem -- a loss in communication -- has been caused around 4 p.m. each of the last two days.

Workers will inspect the trains for any potential "inconsistencies" within the system or its communication hardware, monorail spokesman Todd Walker said.

Trains were running this morning with no problem, Walker said. It appeared Monday's problem was the same as the malfunction that stopped the system Sunday, when technicians inside the $650 million system's command center lost contact with a train just north of the Harrah's-Imperial Palace station, Walker said.

Like the incident Sunday, the trains were stopped about 4 p.m. and were still closed an hour later, Walker said. The system is automatically stopped when communications are lost, he said.

Technicians on Monday afternoon were looking into why the two recent incidents occurred almost exactly 24 hours apart, Walker said. Technicians had the system reopened to passengers by 6:15 p.m., Walker said, ahead of the 7 p.m. reopening on Sunday.

"What we have is a very similar occurrence to what happened yesterday," Walker said.

The trains were closed to passengers for more than three hours Sunday. The cause for that glitch has not been determined.

The Clark County Fire Department was notified of the malfunction and helped evacuate passengers along the elevated track, department spokesman Bob Leinbach said. Exactly how many people were on board was unclear, he said.

Walker estimated 50 to 100 people were evacuated from the train. Five of the six trains returned to their individual stations, while passengers were taken off the the sixth by emergency personnel, he said. No one was injured.

That train that experienced the problem was expected to stay out of public service today.

The monorail, which stops at seven platforms along its four-mile route, reopened in December after a string of malfunctions kept the system -- which opened six months late in July -- closed for 107 days as engineers from the Clark County Building Division investigated what caused a two-pound washer holding the train's driveshaft to fall from a moving car.

That event occurred a day after the system reopened from a six-day closure that began when a 60-pound wheel assembly fell from another train. No one was injured by either the washer or the wheel.

The monorail company estimated it lost about $85,000 in farebox revenue during that closure.

The trains had operated mostly trouble-free since its re-opening, Walker said.