Monorail could resume runs soon, with new limit on number of riders

Passengers could be boarding the Seattle Center Monorail again this week, but there will be limits on how many people can ride a train.

The monorail has been closed for repairs and tests since stalling twice in August.

A new engineering report, commissioned to examine problems with the 44-year-old monorail, recommends no more than 200 riders per trip — about half its capacity when packed. The restrictions should remain for a couple of years until a proposed $4.5 million in repairs to the power supply, air brakes, suspension and drive systems are completed.

A specific day for restarting the trains has not been announced.

The monorail passed a reliability test Sunday night, after running on time under a normal schedule for five days, said Tedd Snyder, an engineer with the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton.

City and monorail officials have been eager to restart the one-mile system for the busy holiday season.

Earlier this year, there was a similar push to revive the trains — in time for late-summer tourists and the Bumbershoot festival — after a crash in November 2005.

But after the city announced the monorail was ready to roll, a July 18 restart was postponed when last-minute testing found glitches. The line opened Aug. 11, but a train stalled two days later.

On Aug. 19, a train stalled again, and 250 people had to be evacuated. Operators couldn't diagnose the problem, and the line was closed indefinitely.

This month's assurances are more solid, said Tom Albro, executive director of Seattle Monorail Services. Unlike the summertime tests conducted with empty trains, the more recent tests were done with full loads.

Outside experts found that the Aug. 19 stall occurred when the train sagged under a fairly normal load. That allowed some carbon "power collectors" aboard the monorail to separate from a metal rail on the track that supplies the electric power.

Snyder said the problem has been fixed — by adjusting some bolts so the power collectors can keep contact with the rail.

But there are still several flaws, some lingering since the 1990s, that must be fixed.

Until that happens, the 200-passenger limit would reduce wear and tear and improve performance, the report said.

"It's like a 1962 Ford truck," Snyder said. "You wouldn't want to put 1,500 pounds of cinder block and run it to work every day. Eventually, something's going to fall apart."

Officials insist ridership limits won't hurt the monorail financially, because most years, there are fewer than 20 days when a train carries more than 200 people.

Public perception is another challenge. When the monorail restarted after a 2004 fire, the system lost 30,000 to 40,000 riders a month because of worries about reliability, or a lack of awareness that the line had reopened.

"It took a period of months for our ridership to recover, and we expect that," Albro said.

The power-supply outage that caused the Aug. 19 stall is completely solved, Snyder said, but he acknowledged some other component could fail and halt a train.

The City Council must decide soon whether to issue $4.5 million in bonds to raise money for a train overhaul, as Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed. The monorail's payments to bond investors would be funded out of city reserve money and future Federal Transit Administration grants.

Snyder said an overhaul would keep the trains going for 20 years.

Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com.