DECEMBER 13, 2015, 11:01 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2015, 11:20 PM
BY CHRISTOPHER MAAG
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
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 Finally, the airport’s old fleet of bouncy, slow, diesel-fuming jitney buses had been replaced by a sleek train passing silently overhead.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,’Ÿ” 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.
https://www.northjersey.com/news/newark-airtrain-s-demise-comes-as-no-surprise-1.1473289
Monorail
It’s more of a Shelbyville idea.
That’s why the toll at the gw bridge is $15 and a much longer more expensive bridge is only $5! (Tap pan zee)
That five dollar toll will not last too much longer.
This will be the parking garage in a few years.
It was a union gig as usual run amok at the expense of nj taxpayers as usual… Sound familiar?