Bettie: Big Surprise! Monorail temporarily shuts down

[Bettie]

From today's LV Review-Journal:

A pair of Las Vegas Monorail workers failed to follow procedures while working on a balky door and allowed a train to leave a station with the door open Wednesday, officials said.

No one was hurt in the 4:30 p.m. incident aboard Train No. 8, which was heading southbound from the Sahara hotel station. The entire system then shut down for about 15 minutes as a precaution.

"This is not an incident we would choose to happen. It violates the procedures," Ron Lynn, chief of the county Department of Development Services' Building Division, which regulates the $650 million monorail, said Thursday.

"It's not a system error. It's human error," Lynn said.

The incident occurred 12 days after the system reopened after a 107-day shutdown, spurred by the third instance of parts falling from a moving train in 2004.

"This isn't a big deal," said Cam Walker, president of monorail manager Transit Systems Management LLC.

The pair of technicians from Bombardier Transportation Inc., the company hired to build and operate the monorail, had been called to reset a single set of doors, Lynn said.

A passenger grabbed at a door, disrupting its opening and closing cycles, Lynn said.

The workers manually propped open the door in a way that allowed the driverless train's computer to operate as if the system had been reset.

The train, not registering that the door was still open, pulled out of the station, Lynn said.

The train then headed to the next stop at the Las Vegas Hilton, where the train was evacuated. No passengers were near the opened door, which faced an emergency escape gangway.

"There was absolutely no safety risk to the passengers inside the train," said Todd Walker, a spokesman for Transit Systems. "Human error should not and won't be accepted on the system. We're confident that Bombardier will deal with the issue."

Todd Walker said: "The good thing is the system worked. They responded to alarms. They were there to ensure the passengers of the system were safe."

He rejected any link to an Aug. 16 incident in which a Bombardier worker accidentally opened a set of passenger car doors facing a drop-off from an elevated track to the street below.

In the August incident, the worker was fired.

[Theoldboozer]

Word around town is that a few of the local
sharpies have put out an interesting new bet;
they have put up an overs/unders line on the
number of days the monorail operates before
being shut down.This time,those that took the
unders collected.No word on the new line yet.

[Saboteur]

That's what it was called on the old Disney monorails. The doors could be opened by the driver or by a platform worker at the station. The buttons to operate the pneumatic system were rendered inoperable when the train was not in the monorail equivalent of "Park".

Occasionally, a door would vibrate just enough that it might disengage from its lock and initiate a "Door Unsafe" warning. When that happens, the train won't move. If it occurs while the train is travelling between stations, the only way the driver can restore power to the motors is to engage the "Door Unsafe" bypass switch. He would get permission to do that from a supervisor via radio. If the door were truly wide open (Disney's doors hinged outward; they didn't "slide" open and closed), you wanted to alert a worker at the next station so he could walk to the edge of the platform and be ready to close the door before it got ripped off its hinges by the fencing at the edge of the station.

Since the LV trains are driverless, it appears that a maintenance person would have to fix a door or flip the bypass switch via the "gang-way". They might also have a way to send the "bypass" command via radio, but that would be a stupid idea since you'd want a human to actually observe what's happening (is the door really open or is the problem just a faulty sensor?) before you re-supply power to the motors. The Disney system didn't have the luxury of a "gang-way" for observers or maintenance personnel.

It sounds like someone forgot that they bypassed safety mechanisms designed to shut down the motors while doors are opened. Dumb.