Light rail in uptown, South End could be down for more than another week. Here’s why.

The Charlotte Area Transit System is trying to speed up a $1.2 million repair that’s put the central segment of the Lynx Blue Line light rail out of commission, but it still might be more than a week until full service is restored.

Trains aren’t running in uptown, South End or between uptown and NoDa. A falling tree damaged the overhead wires that supply electricity and communications to the trains, which run between south Charlotte and UNC Charlotte, as the remnants of Hurricane Michael blew through North Carolina on Thursday.

Contractors are making extensive repairs, but CATS doesn’t have an exact date when the trains will be fully up and running.

“It’s a fluid situation,” said Allen Smith, general manager for the Blue Line. He said his goal is to have service fully restored no more than two weeks from the day the tree fell, and sooner if possible. Crews have been brought in from San Francisco and Denver to carry out the repairs, which include replacing about a mile worth of the the overhead wire that powers the trains.

“The work we’re doing is a three- to four-week job,” he said.

Until service is restored, passengers must use buses that have been set up to link the Blue Line stations that are out of service between the Scaleybark and Sugar Creek stations. Riders have to transfer from the train to the bus or vice versa at those stations to reach their final destinations.

The delays in using a bus bridge are a potential headache for a big group of riders: Weekday average ridership is up to 28,000 on the Blue Line, spokeswoman Krystel Green said.

CATS said it is also working to run a few express buses to uptown during the morning and evening rush hours from Scaleybark and Sugar Creek directly to uptown, to help commuters.

Trains will continue to run between the Interstate 485/South Boulevard and New Bern stations and from the 36th Street to the UNCC main stations.

At the Scaleybark station Tuesday afternoon, riders getting off the “bus bridge” said it took about twice as long as usual to reach there from uptown, roughly 20 minutes. Then they had to get off the buses and wait for the next train to come so they could proceed south.

The Gold Line streetcar service is also down while Blue Line repairs are made.

Smith said that the scale of the repairs is bigger than it might seem at first glance. Although a single tree on private property fell, cutting the overhead wires in one location, it did so at an especially vulnerable spot.

“It was the worst possible location,” Smith said. That’s because it was near where the first segment of the Blue Line, running south, connects to the segment that opened this year, running to UNC Charlotte.

The two segments use different kinds of overhead wire systems: Fixed tension on the southern portion and automatically adjusting tension on the northern portion. Replacing the mile of wire in that section is more complex than it would be if the tree had fallen elsewhere, Smith said.

With that mile of wire out of commission, up to five miles of track is down, Smith said. Asked why the wires couldn’t simply be spliced back together at the point of the break, Smith said that would create a weak point there in the future.

“The best repair is to put things back to their original condition,” he said.

Green said riders who have a monthly pass aren’t eligible for a refund, because service is still being provided via a bus bridge.

“We understand our riders’ frustration,” she said. “We’re asking them to bear with us.”

This story was originally published October 16, 2018 at 9:12 AM.