Opponents Try to Run Colorado Transport Plan Out on a Rail

Miller Hudson’s monorail is no Mickey Mouse novelty from Disneyland 1959. He wants to build a monorail 163 miles from the Plains into the Rockies, and from the ski slopes back to the planes at Denver International Airport.

Hudson, head of a state authority to build a $3.9-billion monorail from Denver to Vail, says Walt Disney’s dream is getting in the way of his--too many people think of monorails as amusement park rides.

“The cost to operate and the ease of the system were the very reason why Disney selected that to move people,” Hudson said.

Colorado voters this fall likely will decide whether to use part of a state tax surplus to build a test track under a referendum drafted by Hudson’s Colorado Intermountain Fixed Guideway Authority.

The Legislature last year killed a $100-million measure to ask voters to approve building a test track in the Plains near Pueblo and a 3.3-mile demonstration line between Silverthorne and Frisco in ski country.

The plan “doesn’t make a lot of sense,” said Dick Wadhams, spokesman for Gov. Bill Owens. “It’s a project that not only has an unproven technology; it wouldn’t take that many people off the highway.”

Owens has called the project an expensive “Disneyland ride.”

The cost of building a monorail would be equivalent to the state’s taking four years’ worth of new roads and road repairs for one elevated train that detractors say would serve some Rocky Mountain ski resorts and nothing else.

In addition, state Transportation Director Tom Norton said the monorail would intercept only a fraction of the traffic on Colorado’s main highway in and out of the Rockies, Interstate 70.

“There’s an abundance of SUVs [sport utility vehicles], that’s what people take up there to camp,” Norton said. “There is a lot more traffic going up there than is just provided in ski areas. They would need roads to get around once they get up there.”

A state study of about 150 alternatives to ease congestion on Interstate 70 should be completed by 2003, Norton said. An elevated train is one of the alternatives.

Under the measure Hudson hopes to put before voters, the group would get $50 million to build a single-rail track near Pueblo and put a train on it powered with a newly invented motor.

Norton said he would oppose spending that much money on a test project. But the authority hopes voters will see the monorail’s merits and approve a public and private funding package in 2005, Hudson said.

If all goes as planned, Hudson hopes the monorail will be running in 2010.

The monorail has other friends.

A group called the Colorado Alliance for a Rapid Transit Solution, composed of residents living along Interstate 70, supports a monorail instead of widening the highway. Officials in Black Hawk are hoping the project helps bring more gamblers up from Denver.

And environmental groups support the environmental friendliness of the train.

But first, engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, which designs all nonnuclear components for the nation’s nuclear weapons, as well as working on energy research and development projects, must see how technology developed to shoot satellites into space works on a train.

They’ve worked it out on paper, and, with a fresh $2-million U.S. Transportation Department grant, engineers have started building a train powered with the motor, said Bob Turman, head of the laboratories’ motor research group.

The Colorado authority also got a $2-million grant to continue its work to build a working model.

The proposed monorail would be elevated 15 to 20 feet and would use a segmented rail phased induction motor, known as a seraphim motor, to power the train at speeds up to 125 miles per hour.

Since the power comes from magnets on the motor and the wheels are not powered, such a motor will allow the train to speed along on steep mountain grades in snow and rain.

Braking would be no problem, Turman said: “You just reverse the force you’re creating.”

One of the questions engineers hope to answer as they test the “super gun” motor is whether the train will carry on-board fuel-powered generators or if the track will be electrified, which could require power plants along the way. That could affect the cost of the project.

Turman prefers having the power plant aboard the train.

The motor, designed in the 1980s and early 1990s, was built for an electric coil gun that needed to reach speeds of about 4 miles per second to shoot satellites into space from a fixed location. The project was scrapped with the end of the Cold War, leaving researchers scrambling to find another use for the technology.

The Colorado authority was created by the Legislature in 1998 and has until 2003 to find out if it can build the monorail. It is also planning to bid on building a monorail between Denver International Airport and downtown’s Union Station as part of the Denver Regional Transportation District’s rail link to the airport.

While Japan has seriously embraced monorails for mass transit, most monorails in the United States and half of those in Germany are in theme parks or zoos.

Hudson, however, remains undaunted in his task to rid the multibillion-dollar project of its Disneyland image.

“I’d have to say they are the most successful entertainment system in the world. It’s working for them, and I think it will work for us,” Hudson said.