Aug. 20—The concourse trains at Denver International Airport experienced major delays Friday after crews made emergency repairs to fix track damage that was caused by an overnight mechanical failure.
It took hours for the repairs, with trains running at reduced capacity. DIA officials reported the repairs were complete just after 10 a.m., and delays getting from the terminal to the concourses subsided about 2 p.m.
The culprit for the track damage, a spokeswoman said later, was a deflated tire on one of the train cars that caused the car to drag on the people mover system's concrete track.
The ripple effects continued into the afternoon, and an airport statement said DIA was "committed to exploring options to provide alternate ways to move passengers between the terminal and concourses and improving our process when incidents like this occur."
The airport had advised travelers to give themselves an extra hour to navigate DIA on Friday and to use the A-Bridge security checkpoint to get to Concourse A if their flights were departing from A gates.
Passengers posted on social media about security screening lines in the terminal extending past the baggage claim, out the doors into the passenger pickup areas. The security line also was much longer than normal on the A-Bridge, passengers reported.
While major disruptions are rare on DIA's undergound Automated Guideway Transit System, the lack of a backup walkway to reach concourses B and C long has drawn passengers' ire. A walkway was excluded from the 26-year-old airport's original design, and during major outages, DIA buses passengers between buildings. But those buses lack the same capacity as the trains, which make a 2.5-mile loop.
Since trains were able to run on part of the system during Friday's repairs, buses were used only initially.
"We feel it now. We would all have loved to have a walkway," DIA spokeswoman Alex Renteria said. "Today's incident is an important reminder that our passengers should have a really great experience while traveling through the airport. ... Possibly missing a flight or being stressed while waiting in line is not the impression we want to leave on people."
Logistics, cost led to no walkway
DIA says it will look at alternatives, but it's unclear whether Friday's incident will renew consideration of building a backup walkway.
DIA officials seriously considered building one within the existing tunnel in the early 2000s, following a string of failures of the train system.
In 2000, a proposal for the first phase of a walkway — between concourses A and B — was estimated to cost $60 million, or about $95 million in today's dollars. But the plan was scrapped, in part over cost concerns and logistics.
In more recent years, the airport has focused on improving the train system's reliability. New train cars have been added both to replace aging cars and to expand the system's capacity. Renteria noted that the train's overall reliability rating is 99.4%.
Earlier Friday, while the emergency repairs were happening, passengers complained of missed flights and packed train cars on social media.
The problem began about 12:30 a.m., when a breaker trip caused a loss of power on four train cars filled with about 200 people. Later Friday, Renteria said technicians responding to the breaker trip discovered damage to about 100 feet of track, requiring emergency repairs.
"The mechanical failure was identified as a deflated tire, which caused the train to drop a couple inches and drag on the track which damaged the power rail," she wrote in an email.
The passengers were stuck onboard for about four minutes, a DIA spokesperson said, then exited the train via the tunnels. Buses were used to transport people from concourses B and C to Concourse A, where they could walk to the terminal, but one passenger said she was stranded on Concourse C for two hours, until 2:30 a.m.
There was some chaos amid the waiting on Friday. One traveler pointed out that their flight departed early, and some airlines were not waiting because of the delays.
Another person missed their flight.
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