First published in The Record Dec. 24, 2015

AirTrain failure no surprise — newark train Plagued from day one

When the AirTrain monorail opened at Newark International Airport in 1996, it was viewed as an engineering marvel. Finally, the airport's old fleet of bouncy, slow, diesel-fuming jitney buses had been replaced by a sleek train passing silently overhead.

"There will be no more people saying, 'I got to the airport in 10 minutes but it took me 30 minutes to travel around the terminals,' " said John J. Haley Jr., deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. "The system is absolutely safe and reliable."

Safe, maybe. But AirTrain Newark was never reliable. And that should have come as no surprise to the people responsible for bringing it to the airport.

They knew because they were told by the man who sold it to them.

"It was a system that had not been run previously in the snow," said Paul H. Wyss, now 80 and retired for 20 years. He conceived the project in the early 1990s when he was chief of American operations for Von Roll Transport. "Everybody knew ahead of time that there would be issues with snow and snow removal," he said.

That proved to be an understatement. Even before AirTrain was finished, the Port Authority had serious problems clearing snow and ice, which delayed the monorail's opening. Those issues -- plus a half-dozen more -- grew worse over the next two decades.

Finally, 19 years after it went into service, Port Authority Executive Director Pat Foye announced in May that AirTrain Newark must be scrapped.

When informed that the system he helped design is nearing its demise, Wyss took the news in stride. Decades ago, he had predicted that, too.

"I'm not surprised that they reached the end of the system's capacity," he said. "We knew all along that the system probably wouldn't last too long."

Over its short life, AirTrain Newark cost the Port Authority more than $1 billion for construction and repairs.

Now the agency plans to spend up to $2 billion on a new people mover at Newark.

"We don't want to repeat that mistake," Foye said.

But some experts say any future system that builds on old concepts may, in fact, be a mistake -- and fail for some of the same reasons as the current one did, by saddling the agency with expensive, out-of-date machinery as other major airports around the world forsake people-moving trains entirely.

As discussions get under way at the Port Authority to figure out what to do, the history of Newark Liberty International Airport's ill-fated monorail could provide a cautionary tale. Its failures began before it even opened.

And it all started with a skinny little notch in the ceiling.

A notch too tight

When architects for the Port Authority dreamed up a new airport for Newark in the late 1960s, they drew three terminal buildings on the edge of an oval parking lot. The plans included wide gaps between the buildings, to be knitted together someday by a mass transit system.

Such systems take different forms. The trains at the airport in Houston resemble city buses. The monorail at the Tampa Airport has tiny cars resembling droids from "Star Wars."

Newark didn't have enough passengers to require a people mover, so the planners tried to think ahead. Since they didn't know which system would eventually work, they placed a notch in the ceilings of the terminal buildings, just behind the check-in desks. That way, when a train eventually was needed, the Port Authority would have an easy place to build it.

"It was visionary," said Huntley A. Lawrence, now the agency's general manager for aviation, who oversaw AirTrain Newark for years. "It was a whole vision for how the terminals were going to look and how you would integrate transit into the terminals."

By 1995, the annual passenger count had reached 26.6 million and the airport's roadways were congested with traffic, including a fleet of buses transporting passengers between the terminals and parking garages.

Newark Airport needed a train.

But there was a problem. Over the ensuing two decades, train systems for airports had grown more complex -- and fatter -- said Lawrence Fabian, a city planner who specializes in airport people movers.

The notch, perfectly sized in the early 1970s, now seemed very small.

Multiple companies bid on the project, Lawrence said, but most offered trains too big for the notch. Only one had a system that fit: Von Roll Transport's monorail, which originally was developed for small amusement parks and shopping centers in the Southern Hemisphere. Not only did Von Roll's system require minimal changes to the buildings, the Swiss company's bid also was the cheapest: an estimated cost of $140 million.

"If you decided that you wanted something larger, you would have had to spend money to demolish the terminal by the notch and then rebuild it," Lawrence said. "So that was a factor. It was an important factor."

But in the small community of mass transit aficionados, the purchase raised eyebrows.

"There was a lot of surprise in the industry when Von Roll got this contract," said Kim A. Pedersen, founder and president of The Monorail Society, a group of enthusiasts. "Von Rolls were known to have different kinds of mechanical glitches. Their systems are vulnerable in the winter."

Problems start Day 1

By the time the Port Authority granted Von Roll the contract, it had only just begun to engineer a heating system to clear snow and ice from the track. Then, before construction started, Von Roll was purchased by another company.

"I thought at the time that they would have to make special provisions to remove snow and ice before it ran," Wyss said.

That problem, plus re-engineering the complex switches that Von Roll had built to move trains from one track to another, delayed construction by a year and a half, and more than doubled the system's cost to $354 million.

Even after all that, come opening day on May 31, 1996, the heating system still wasn't fixed. Every night for the next few months, the Port Authority shut down AirTrain to continue tweaking the rail heaters. There were other problems, too. On that first day, travelers complained to The Record that the doors failed to close, and the cars were too small to handle the crowds.

One of the early riders was people mover expert Lawrence Fabian. He was amazed by how terrible it was.

"I'm someone who dedicated my career to advanced transit, and this thing was so wobbly and slow that it was embarrassing to me that this would be counted as advanced transit," Fabian said.

Engineers at the Port Authority felt the wobble, too. Almost immediately, they noticed the system's steel rail was bending too much under the weight of the trains, and some of the steel support beams were cracking under the strain, according to a report by researchers at Purdue University.

To fix those problems, AirTrain's first major shutdown came just 18 months after it opened.

Even more problems came in winter. That's because no other city in the world has ever attempted what the Port Authority did in Newark: Build a monorail with a steel rail that's exposed to the elements, in a city with cold winters.

"It was unique," Wyss said.

To understand the problem, Wyss said, imagine a car's rubber tires rolling across a steel bridge in winter. If the bridge is covered in ice, the car won't have enough traction to start or stop.

Von Roll monorails had only been built in warm cities, Wyss said, mostly in places where they could close every night for maintenance. Building one that runs 24 hours a day in a place like Newark "was a borderline situation," he said.

The Port Authority never solved the problem. The original heating system was inadequate, Lawrence said, allowing slush to accumulate on the rail and forcing trains to stop. The Port Authority had to suspend AirTrain service twice, once in 1999 and again in 2010, to overhaul that system, Lawrence said.

Other issues surfaced. The rubber tires rubbed paint off the rail, which caused rust and reduced traction. The air compressors were too small to charge the pneumatic brake systems, which caused the safety systems to shut down the trains, sometimes stranding passengers between stations, Lawrence said.

The computerized operating systems often could not maintain appropriate speeds on the rail's twisty path, causing safety overrides and even more shutdowns. Von Roll's unique system of switches failed regularly, Lawrence said.

But despite all those problems, the Port Authority decided AirTrain Newark was worthy of an expansion. A four-mile extension to the Northeast Corridor, where passengers could connect with NJ Transit trains, opened in 2001 at a cost of $415 million.

Already too small to handle crowds inside the airport, the monorail now struggled to accommodate passengers from commuter trains, too.

"As it has been scaled up to serve the long-term parking lots and a rail line, the system is showing its inability to handle these additional tasks," said Richard Barone, director of transportation programs for the Regional Plan Association.

Many of these problems continue today, causing regular shutdowns. The latest happened the weekend before Thanksgiving.

"It's absolutely ridiculous," said Jason Scherman, who rides the AirTrain a few times a week. "Every time they close this thing I have to get on a bus, which adds 45 minutes to my trip. It's absurd, and it's a huge waste of time."

As the volume of passengers keeps climbing, the system could be completely overwhelmed. Last year, 35.6 million passengers used Newark Airport, according to the Port Authority, far outstripping the FAA's predictions of 23 million people a year. Now, the Port Authority believes that in two decades the number of passengers will reach 56.8 million.

AirTrain was never intended to handle that many people, Wyss said.

"Airport people think in terms of a jumbo jet coming in, and they want to get rid of a lot of people in a hurry," Wyss said. "You can't do that with a monorail because it's a trickle service. It's just too small."

'This is frustrating'

There was no snow in Newark on a recent Thursday afternoon, and the airport was not busy. But AirTrain was causing problems for travelers anyway. Tad Strong ran up the stairs to the AirTrain station inside Terminal B dragging a suitcase on wheels.

He stopped at the first car. Five people stood inside, leaving no room for Strong. He ran to the next car. And the next. Each was filled to the brim, with five or six people. Strong reached the front of the train, the doors closed and he was left at the station.

"This is frustrating. It happens almost every time," said Strong, who rides AirTrain at least once a week. "They need bigger trains."

To avoid such problems, Russell Marks travels light, carrying just a backpack for his weekly business trips from Newark. But that's little help when AirTrain breaks.

"When the system is down, there's nothing I can do," Marks said. "I've definitely missed flights when this thing was shut down and I had to take the bus."

Now, the Port Authority is spending $40 million to begin planning a replacement for the AirTrain, and has committed $94 million to keep the old system limping along until it can conceive, design and construct its successor by 2022.

And like the existing system, which seemed a good idea at the outset, some experts believe this new plan may turn out to be misguided. Back in the 1970s and '80s, people movers at airports were relatively cheap to build, Fabian said. In the ensuing decades, they've grown far more complex and expensive.

"Tampa built two systems in the 1970s for $4 million apiece," Fabian said. "Now each one of those things costs $2 billion."

People movers have grown so expensive that most new airports are abandoning them. Beijing's massive airport, which is scheduled to open in 2018 and is being built to serve 120 million people a year, doesn't have one.

"Even huge airports, where previously they would've put in a people mover, now they avoid it with moving walkways," Fabian said. "Or they just make people walk a lot."

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