Gomezticator
September 16th, 2005, 12:08 PM
A story in Las Vegas Citylife on troubles with the new monorail. (http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/articles/2005/09/15/cover_story/cover.txt)
Building it isn't all wine and roses, folks. The LVM has had a variety of mechanical failures since it's opening....
In fact, what people were really going to be saying was quite different. In January, 15 days before the monorail was supposed to be open, a drive shaft fell from a train to the ground below. Further testing delayed the monorail's launch until March 1. (The incident was especially poor timing for Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, who had been tapped to replace Broadbent at Transit Systems Management in January.)
March melted into summer, with Bombardier and Granite Construction, another contractor, racking up big fines for the delays. Finally, in a party that stretched to every station, the monorail opened on July 15, 2004, carrying 30,515 passengers on its first day.
But the good times were not to roll for long. In August 2004, a worker running a train in "manual" mode opened doors on the wrong side of a train, facing nothing but a steep drop-off to the street below the Convention Center station. (The worker was later fired.) In September 2004, a rubber tire fell from a train, shuttering the system during the heavily attended MAGIC trade show. (In that incident, workers ignored an alarm warning of problems.) A few days later, a two-pound part fell from another train, shutting the system down for what was to be a long while.
Fitch Ratings responded to the incident by putting the monorail's bonds on a negative watch list, even as the monorail hired a disaster expert from California to locate the problems and fix them. By December, with only a single, allegedly defective bolt having fallen from a train during testing, the system was ready to reopen, which it did on Christmas Eve to a record crowd of 45,000 riders. But it was too late for the federal government, which withdrew its support for funding part of the downtown extension of the monorail. The train that was supposedly begun as a public service had cost the public millions in potential funding.
And that wasn't all: In February, a 30-foot section of electrified rail shorted out, stalling trains. By this time, Moody's Investors Service had dropped the monorail's bonds to "non-investment" grade, otherwise known as junk status, where they remain to this day. That black mark makes it harder for the company to borrow money, and certainly increases the cost to do so.
The indignities continued through May, when a mysterious "loss of communication" stranded passengers two days in a row, for 40 and 30 minutes, respectively. By May 16, Gibson was telling R-J political reporter Erin Neff that he would leave his job, saying he only took the post to fill in for (monorail founder Bob) Broadbent after his death. (Gibson is currently hiring staff to mount a bid for the Democratic nomination for governor.)
One misfire knocks the entire system out of commission. On multiple occasions. A monorail is only useful when it's running.
Read the rest of the article and gain some insight into what it took to get a system working in Las Vegas, and what the end result is.
Building it isn't all wine and roses, folks. The LVM has had a variety of mechanical failures since it's opening....
In fact, what people were really going to be saying was quite different. In January, 15 days before the monorail was supposed to be open, a drive shaft fell from a train to the ground below. Further testing delayed the monorail's launch until March 1. (The incident was especially poor timing for Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, who had been tapped to replace Broadbent at Transit Systems Management in January.)
March melted into summer, with Bombardier and Granite Construction, another contractor, racking up big fines for the delays. Finally, in a party that stretched to every station, the monorail opened on July 15, 2004, carrying 30,515 passengers on its first day.
But the good times were not to roll for long. In August 2004, a worker running a train in "manual" mode opened doors on the wrong side of a train, facing nothing but a steep drop-off to the street below the Convention Center station. (The worker was later fired.) In September 2004, a rubber tire fell from a train, shuttering the system during the heavily attended MAGIC trade show. (In that incident, workers ignored an alarm warning of problems.) A few days later, a two-pound part fell from another train, shutting the system down for what was to be a long while.
Fitch Ratings responded to the incident by putting the monorail's bonds on a negative watch list, even as the monorail hired a disaster expert from California to locate the problems and fix them. By December, with only a single, allegedly defective bolt having fallen from a train during testing, the system was ready to reopen, which it did on Christmas Eve to a record crowd of 45,000 riders. But it was too late for the federal government, which withdrew its support for funding part of the downtown extension of the monorail. The train that was supposedly begun as a public service had cost the public millions in potential funding.
And that wasn't all: In February, a 30-foot section of electrified rail shorted out, stalling trains. By this time, Moody's Investors Service had dropped the monorail's bonds to "non-investment" grade, otherwise known as junk status, where they remain to this day. That black mark makes it harder for the company to borrow money, and certainly increases the cost to do so.
The indignities continued through May, when a mysterious "loss of communication" stranded passengers two days in a row, for 40 and 30 minutes, respectively. By May 16, Gibson was telling R-J political reporter Erin Neff that he would leave his job, saying he only took the post to fill in for (monorail founder Bob) Broadbent after his death. (Gibson is currently hiring staff to mount a bid for the Democratic nomination for governor.)
One misfire knocks the entire system out of commission. On multiple occasions. A monorail is only useful when it's running.
Read the rest of the article and gain some insight into what it took to get a system working in Las Vegas, and what the end result is.