Monorail to be Off Track for Weeks, Not days, Official Says

Several weeks will be needed to determine what's ailing the Las Vegas Monorail and make permanent fixes to the troubled rail line, an official said Monday.

That forecast means it's likely the monorail will remain closed well into the fall.

"It's premature to project an exact timeline, but we know it will be weeks as opposed to days before we open," said Todd Walker, a monorail spokesman.

The $650 million monorail has been sidelined since Wednesday, when a part fell from a train behind Paris Las Vegas. It was the third time this year that debris had fallen from a moving train.

Monorail officials plan to hire an independent consultant to look not only at the latest round of mechanical failures but also at how the trains are maintained and operated.

As of Monday, monorail officials were still whittling down the list of potential consultants and had yet to hire one. Until that takes place, a timeline to report back to the monorail company won't be set.

That consultant will need time to assemble an investigative team, travel here, pore over trains and records, and then recommend, implement and test whatever fixes are needed.

Also inspecting the system will be officials from Clark County who must give the go-ahead for the system to reopen; existing monorail consultant Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Va.; and monorail builder and operator Bombardier Corp. of Montreal.

Las Vegas' nine monorail trains were among the final products of Bombardier's Kingston, Ontario, factory before the plant closed last fall, as contracts assigned there dried up. Last month, Bombardier announced the plant would not reopen.

One of the monorail's prior problems was traced back to that plant. The failure of a wheel that broke away from a train Sept. 1 was later blamed on improper installation done in Kingston.

Helene Gagnon, a Bombardier spokeswoman, said the closing in Kingston and problems in Las Vegas are coincidental. "It's definitely not related to the plant closing," she said.

The monorail isn't the first high-tech Bombardier product to suffer major problems.

In 2002, Acela high-speed trains built by Bombardier were taken out of service by Amtrak after cracks were found on suspension systems that could have dropped off moving trains as a result, according to CBC News, a Canadian broadcast.

That led Bombardier to file a lawsuit against Amtrak, alleging that Amtrak insisted Bombardier press trains into service even though Bombardier had concerns about defective wheel assemblies, the Boston Business Journal reported. Amtrak later countersued.

"Both Amtrak and Bombardier have recognized that the design and construction of the Acela trainsets has been delayed and complicated by the numerous disputes between them," according to a case summary provided by Lexisone.com, a legal research Web site.

The lawsuits were settled out of court last month. Under those terms, Bombardier and its partners were paid $42.5 million of $70 million it was owed, and a contract for a Bombardier affiliate to maintain the trains was shortened, Amtrak officials said.

"Every transit supplier has issues on systems they bring out for the public to use," Walker said. "It's not a concern. Our concern is making sure this system is safe and carrying passengers."

Bombardier, which builds everything from trains and watercraft to jets and missiles, has more than $15 billion in annual sales but has seen financial pressures as of late.

The company has been buffeted by anticipated future weak demand for its jets amid airline bankruptcies, slim profits in the rail division and $7 billion in debt.

RBC Capital Markets, a Toronto, Canada-based investment bank, is forecasting Bombardier's stock to "underperform" while carrying "above average risk" and on Monday, Standard & Poor's said it was considering cutting Bombardier's credit rating to "junk" status.

The company's stock price as of late has hovered around $3 a share, less than half of what it was earlier this year.

Problems haven't prevented Bombardier from landing other big contracts as of late.

In July, it was awarded a $600 million deal to build and run a Korean rapid-transit line, and last month it was given part of a Chinese train project worth an estimated $4.5 billion to the company.

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Monorail to be Off Track for Weeks, Not days, Official Says