Monday, April 12, 1999 | 10:30 a.m.
A $20 million people mover that opened Friday linking Circus Circus' three southern Las Vegas Strip properties is being hailed as a prototype for future airport transportation systems.
Project consultant Andrew Jakes, who wrote an article about the new people mover system in the trade journal Movers, said the technology used for the system linking Excalibur and Mandalay Bay is a less expensive alternative to existing airport monorail systems.
Jakes is founder of Jakes Associates Inc., San Jose, Calif., and has worked on most of Las Vegas' people mover systems.
He said the Austria-based Doppelmayr Group, which designed the system, is expected to use the Mandalay Bay people mover to demonstrate a working cable-driven system.
The people mover, which links the corner of Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South with Mandalay Bay, opened to the public Friday after a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the system's Excalibur hotel-casino station.
Costumed characters from Circus Circus' Excalibur, Luxor and Mandalay Bay properties were on hand for the opening. An invitation had been issued to famed tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who performed at Mandalay Bay Saturday night, to christen the people mover, but the singer declined.
About 150 people attended the opening ceremony, including about 50 from Doppelmayr.
The new system operates as an express southbound from Tropicana and the Strip to Mandalay Bay. On the northbound run, the five-car train stops briefly at Luxor and Excalibur before reaching the end of the half-mile line.
The southbound run takes about two to three minutes to complete while the northbound train takes about five to six minutes to go the length of the track.
The free shuttle, which operates at up to 22 mph, uses many of the same principles as San Francisco's fabled cable cars. The train is propelled along the guideway with a moving cable and can be operated without a driver.
Known in the industry as a Cable Liner, the shuttle uses a continuously moving haul rope integrated into the track system. It's the first tram system in the United States to utilize so-called ski-lift technology.
Jakes' Mover article compares the Mandalay Bay people mover to a monorail project at Newark International Airport in New Jersey.
The airport monorail system will have a capacity of 7,000 passengers per day because the similarly designed train cars are smaller than those on the Mandalay Bay system. The airport system cost $415 million while Jakes said the Mandalay Bay system cost $20 million, including construction of the four stations.
Circus Circus has not released the cost of the system, but the article said the trains, track and propulsion system cost $15.7 million with the rest going for construction of the stations.
"The narrow, light and transparent nature of the guideway makes it not only very elegant and unobtrusive, but also cost effective," the article says. "The guideway may be lit with an active strobe light arrangement. Two automated five-car trains will resemble the appearance of the Transrapid, the German super-high-speed maglev train. However, the trains will be totally black with additional aesthetic enhancements that will produce a spectacular visual impact along the famous Strip.
Doppelmayr, based in Wolfurt, Austria, has built transportation systems in 45 countries. In addition to people movers, the company designs and builds ski lifts, freight and passenger elevators, stockkeeping stacker cranes and merchandise handling systems and mechanical car parking systems.
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