Map courtesy Valley Metro Metro Light Rail Crack Locations

The 20-mile light rail system that will run from west Phoenix to Mesa is arguably the most complicated road project in city – if not state – history.

To build it, a local board of directors is using taxpayer money to pay eight different companies from all over the country to use steel from Austria and build a futuristic transit system in the desert.

Everything was, ahem, on track until December. That’s when crews noticed at least nine cracks ranging from 1.5 inches to 7.5 inches wide in the rails running between Downtown and Tempe. A light rail spokeswoman says the cracks are normal, yet Valley Metro Rail hired a small group of specialists in January to investigate. (Valley Metro manages the rail.)

The firm, Zeta-Tech Associates from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, was hired for $50,000 because it can get “down to the molecular level of rail,” says Phoenix light rail spokeswoman Marty McNeil. San Francisco Bay Area transit officials hired the company in 1993 to help figure out why a train there derailed, injuring 14 passengers.

The results of the Phoenix study were not available at press time. But McNeil says crews, working under Zeta-Tech’s instructions, had started grinding down parts of the rails in “areas of suspicion,” suggesting that the problem may be in the makeup of the steel itself. “Rail breaks routinely occur in the rail industry,” McNeil says. “It’s just part of the deal.”

Yet officials in western cities with established light rail systems disagree on this point. A rail spokesman for the system in Denver supports McNeil, saying cracks are normal and that Denver’s system experienced a dozen or so after construction began in 1994.

The rails were made of steel from a mill based in Pueblo, Colorado, and from scrap steel taken from the now-defunct Mile High Stadium, where the Denver Broncos played football until 2001.

Huge temperature swings can lead to the formation of cracks in the rail during construction, says Scott Reed, a Denver light rail spokesman. He says that special devices – along with some guesswork – are used to determine the expansion and contraction of the rails before they are welded together and put in place.

“Sometimes it can go too far one way or the other,” and cracks can form, Reed says.

But rail experts for systems in Salt Lake City, Dallas and Portland say these cracks are not normal. All of the engineers or inspectors interviewed by PHOENIX magazine acknowledged that temperatures can play a role, but none of them say they had ever encountered Phoenix-like cracks in their respective systems.

“Seven inches sounds like a big number,” says rail inspector Gary Hopkins, a 29-year veteran of Portland’s super-sized line.

One independent rail official says Phoenix contractors should see if the steel was properly “de-stressed” – the art of heating, cooling, cutting and re-welding steel in preparation for use – before it was encased in rubber and set in cement. If that’s not a factor, there may have been too much carbon in the steel, says Greg Thorpe, manager of Salt Lake City’s light rail construction.