Interesting visual...assuming their estimates per mile is still correct and using today's pricing for concrete and steel a mile of monorail track would cost
$1,470,000.00 for material alone.
Assuming a cost of 150.00 per cubic yard of concrete and 500.00 per ton of steel rebar .
Of course @
edwardtc might help me out on today's prices if I'm way off.
$150 for concrete is for regular 2000 psi concrete used in everyday construction. If I am not mistaken the monorail beams use a very specific blend that costs much more. Also the monorail beams use pretensioned steel cables in addition to rebar. The cost of that is around double that of rebar.
First, excellent post. Really sheds some light on the cost of monorail expansions for the folks who haven't seen it, or thought about it, in real dollars and cents.
I'll second some things Yoda said, and add more comments.
I think $150/cy for concrete might be safe, and would include labor/placement. I agree that they use a high compression concrete for the beams, but the placement is done via crane/bucket at the fabrication site, and economies of scale help a lot. $200/cy might be more realistic, given the major setup it requires to fabricate them. I had the pleasure of visiting the site just outside Vegas in the early 2000s when they were casting the beams for Vegas' "new" monorail system. They were identical to WDW's.
Deformed bar runs $500-650/ton these days, depending on quantity, and special/custom bends. The monorail beam cages are extremely complicated - lots of continuous bars running the length, tied to bars bent into squares of gradated sizes to wrap the profile of the beam every 12" or so. Rebar itself would probably be on the higher end of the range.
Plus, you have incidentals like the connecting and splice plates, the hollow tubing that runs down the middle of the beams for the pre-tension cables, the cables themselves (which Yoda mentioned), and the massive amount of Styrofoam that makes up the majority of the core of each beam.
So, if anything, your cost per mile is low, but definitely sheds some real light on today's cost.
