Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit Totally Explained

Everything about Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit totally explained

The Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit project is an experimental people-mover in Morgantown, West Virginia, in the United States, by the U.S. Department of Transportation and Boeing Vertol in the 1970s. This college-town system is a sister project to Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), of San Francisco, California.

History

In 1974, Boeing Vertol began construction of the first major PRT project, designed for West Virginia University in Morgantown. The Morgantown campus is disconnected; the system was designed to link the separate parcels. In particular, Health Sciences near Evansdale is situated on a plateau above the Monongahela River valley.
During construction, the program's director was changed several times, causing bureaucratic problems and some system peculiarities are thought to be the result of the management problems.
The WVU PRT began operation in 1975. There was an interruption in service during the 1978-9 school year to allow system expansion from the "Engineering" station to new stations at the "Towers" dormitories and the WVU Medical Center/Mountaineer Field. During this time, WVU provided bus service between the campuses.

Operations

The system connects the university's disjointed campus through five stations (Walnut, Beechurst, Engineering, Towers, Medical) and an 8.65 mile (13.9 kilometer) track. The cars are equipped with eight seats, four in the front and four more in the back, and four PVC poles for standing riders to grasp, and run on a cement track with rubber tires and are powered by electric pickups on the sides of each car. On one or both sides of the track are electrified rails and the wheels turn slightly toward whichever side is powered so the cars stay in contact with the rails. When a car approaches a station it can either continue straight and bypass the station or the wheels will turn and follow the electrified rails on the other side. With the Morgantown area being very hilly and the winters cold and snowy, a system of steam pipes was embedded in the concrete track on the steepest parts of the line to keep the cars from slipping on snow and ice. This heating system wasn't a standard feature and was only applied to the Morgantown system. Sometimes breakdowns in the heating system or severe weather conditions have caused the line to be shutdown and stranded cars and passengers are retrieved by specially modified Jeeps that can pull the cars up the affected grade to the next station. As of November 2007, the PRT transports about 16,000 riders per day.
In the 2006 fiscal year, the PRT system broke down a total of 259 times for a total of 65 hours and 42 minutes, out of a total of 3,640 hours and 15 minutes scheduled running time, which equates to about 98% availability. Of those 259 breakdowns, 159 were caused by vehicle-related problems. The PRT system has recently received funding to improve efficiency by reducing this vehicle downtime.
Since the system's completion in 1975, technology for such systems has advanced considerably, while the Morgantown PRT has changed very little. The control room is said to resemble a NASA mission control room from the 1970s, though the underlying electronics are more complex. Despite these factors, the overall availability of service (98%) exceeds the original design specification of 96.5% availability.

Rolling stock

The system is powered by a 300-volt direct-current electric motor driving the four small pneumatic tires. Though the motor uses direct current, the track uses a three-contact system that looks like a three-phase system. Steam heat appears to be supplied to the track partly by the riverside power plant that heats the campus buildings during winter with excess or 'waste' steam. Additional steam can be provided by several boiler plants along the track. The track itself is made of poured concrete, with some spans up to 30 feet (9.1 meters) above the ground. Instead of rails, the wheels roll on bare cement, presumably because of the very steep climb from Beechurst to Evansdale.
In recent years, the old automation system has been replaced and upgraded; new insulation has been added to the external steam lines for the track heat.

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