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RAILS IN THE AIR

The living legacy of the WVU PRT

By West Virginia University

November 3^rd, 2025

The doors of the small gold-and-blue car slide open with a sigh. Inside, the seats are plain but familiar, and there exists a recognizable yet faint electrical whir. It smells a little like your grandparents’ house in the best possible way. Through the window, the Monongahela River curves like a ribbon, the hillsides rise steep and green or orange or white, depending on the time of year, and the West Virginia University campuses stretch across the small valley.

It’s easy to take this ride for granted. For 50 years, the WVU Personal Rapid Transit system — the PRT — has been carrying students, professors, and townspeople above the clogged city streets, shuttling them between downtown Morgantown, the Evansdale area of campus, and the sprawling Health Sciences complex.

But when the idea for the PRT was unveiled it was more than just a transit system. It was a promise. A declaration that this small Appalachian city could become the testbed for a transportation revolution.

Samy Elias, the “father of the PRT”

An architectural drawing of the Beechurst PRT Station.

An architectural drawing of the Walnut Street PRT Station.

THE EARLY DAYS

In the late 1960s, WVU was bursting at the seams. Enrollment exploded following World War II. Lecture halls filled, dorm occupancy rose and a new campus sprouted 2 miles from downtown. Students crisscrossed the city on foot, in cars, or by hitchhiking along narrow mountain roads. The commute between classes could chew up hours.

Federal officials were watching. Traffic clogged America’s cities. An oil crisis loomed. The newly formed U.S. Department of Transportation was looking for bold experiments in urban transit. Morgantown’s geography — hilly, compact, bisected by a river — made it the perfect laboratory.

In 1969, Jack Byrd, now Professor Emeritus, was then faculty in the WVU Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources’ Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering. He distinctly remembers standing in the office of colleague Samy Elias, a transportation pioneer and, by all accounts, the father of the WVU PRT.

“He said to me: ‘Jack, imagine that someday we’ll have a transportation system that will carry students from one campus to another,’” Byrd said. “That was my first engagement with the concept of what would become the PRT.”

The pair submitted a grant request to the DOT primed and searching for transportation solutions, asking it to fund a feasibility study on ways to connect the University’s campuses that, if successful, might be replicated elsewhere.

“For the next year or so, we got proposals from transportation people all over the country for how they proposed to connect the campuses. There were probably between 10 and 20 of those — some were pretty bizarre. There was one proposal that would have built a tunnel that would suck students from one campus to another, sort of like one of those vacuum tubes. Most of the proposals were along the lines of multi-vehicle transportation systems. There was only one that responded to the real needs of the University.”

Once the men had a feasible plan, legislative lobbying began and centered on former U.S. Rep. Harley Staggers Sr. who served West Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District for 16 terms. Byrd said without Staggers, the PRT would never have happened.

The perfect storm was also brewing. The Boeing Company, and its deep pockets, purchased Alden Self-Transit Systems, the small business that crafted the PRT concept chosen by Elias and Byrd, and could afford the performance bond that the project would require. Former President Richard Nixon, eyeing another term, chose public transportation as one of the focuses of his second campaign. The push was on to get a concept that until then had only existed on paper built before the election.

A crane is pictured during construction of the WVU PRT.

Construction underway for the Walnut Street PRT Station.

The WVU PRT track under construction along Beechurst Avenue in 1972.

Construction of the Beechurst PRT station with Armstrong and Woodburn halls in the background.

BUILDING THE FUTURE

Construction began in the early 1970s. Concrete guideways arced above the city streets. Stations rose with angular, space-age lines. Rubber-tired vehicles — more like mini-buses than train cars — were designed to zip along elevated tracks, controlled entirely by computers.

The project was plagued with delays and ballooning costs. Weather slowed construction. Early computers struggled to coordinate dozens of cars at once. Critics dismissed it as a “boondoggle,” another federal fantasy doomed to failure.

Lewis McDaniel, a WVU alum, U.S. Army veteran, and one of the PRT’s first employees, met his wife Carolyn, a PRT business manager at the time, while working on the project. He was part of a group responsible for getting the system up and running back then, which he described as a tall order. More than 20,000 individual parts — many bespoke and retrofitted from other intended applications — all had to work together to accommodate passenger safety, assign destinations, and locate vehicles all while governing their speed and avoiding obstacles in their path, including other cars.

“One sound that I remember on our test rides was silence,” McDaniel described. “Many things could — and did — go wrong and that meant any one of us would be stranded in the vehicle while the issue was rectified. When we were on-board testing, we knew to take a book, something to eat and drink, and an empty bottle just in case.”

McDaniel said that although technical background manuals were provided by Boeing to the team, most of what they really needed to know was learned operationally, on the fly. But there was never any notion that it would not work, he continued.

The team pressed on, readying the system for October 24, 1972 — the official dedication of the WVU PRT. Phase 1 of the system opened between the Downtown and Evansdale areas of campus. Nixon sent his daughter Patricia to Morgantown for the occasion. She was the first to ride on the system and likened it to Disneyland when she made it back to the station. Only a few cars left the station that day before the system shut down. It was back to testing for the PRT crew.

That following winter wreaked havoc on the guideways as salt water intrusion from city streets caused the system to short circuit. Those kinks and others were worked out, and the system opened to the public in the fall of 1975. Within a few more years, the line extended to Health Sciences, finally connecting all three of the Morgantown campuses.

Lewis McDaniel, a WVU alum, U.S. Army veteran, and one of the PRT’s first employees, met his wife Carolyn, a PRT business manager at the time, while working on the project. Here, 50 years later, they sit together in a PRT replica at the Visitors Center.

Development of the PRT brought Carolyn and Lewis McDaniel together.

WVU officials take the PRT for a spin in its early days.

Credited with founding the WVU PRT, Sammy Elias (right) and a colleague take a ride on the vehicle.

A MACHINE THAT BECAME A CITY SYMBOL

Over time, what began as an experiment became a way of life. Morgantown remains the only city in the United States with a working personal rapid transit system. The PRT is stamped on postcards, folded into campus tours, and woven into the town’s identity.

Estimates are that its vehicles have made 100 million trips since 1975, traveled 40 million miles, or 167 roundtrip voyages to the moon, and have carried more than 83 million passengers thus far. More than 12,000 passengers still ride the PRT daily during the academic year. It’s hard to beat when the trip from Walnut Street on the Downtown Campus to Health Sciences takes just 11 minutes, on average.

Generations of students have crammed — the official record stands at 97 recorded in 2000 — into the little cars — lugging backpacks, sports equipment, musical instruments, and late-night takeout. But to riders, the PRT isn’t futuristic anymore. It’s just part of WVU — a little quirky, sometimes fickle, universally beloved.

Director Jeremy Evans said PRT availability is measured annually. In its 5 decades of operation, the PRT’s safety record rivals that of much larger transit systems and its operators boast a system availability rate of 98.78%, last measured in 2024.

“The PRT system is part of the WVU identity, but more than that, it just isn’t possible to efficiently run the University without it,” Evans said. “The urban traffic issues that led to its development 50 years ago still haven’t been resolved. Imagine the congestion now if there was no PRT and those 12,000-plus rides had to be converted to buses or cars.”

The system is also under near-constant maintenance and renovations to keep it running smoothly. By the 1980s and ’90s, critics were calling it too expensive to maintain, too idiosyncratic to replicate, too quirky for serious transit planners.

Maintenance has continued to be a recurring theme. The system’s computer controls, cutting-edge in the 1970s, grew obsolete. Replacement parts had to be custom-made. Still, even the most futuristic systems are vulnerable to very old problems: geology, weather, and gravity.

Yet the PRT has endured. The University invested in upgrades — new control systems in the 1990s and again in the 2010s and now a multimillion-dollar renovation effort set to extend the system’s life into the 2030s.

Evans said his team is in the midst of renovating the PRT stations and guideway and hopes to have Phase 1 of that plan complete by 2030. The outcome — more modern stations and an improved guideway infrastructure. He also hopes to tackle vehicle modernization. But big plans often come with big price tags.

“The big challenge is how to fund this $100 million project,” Evans explained. “In the meantime, our maintenance staff does an amazing job maintaining and repairing current vehicles and our engineering team monitors parts obsolescence and works to mitigate those issues as they arise.”

An archived photo of the entry ramp to the Downtown Campus with the PRT running in the background.

An archive photo of the PRT running from the Walnut Street Station.

A PRT cart zooms along the autumn landscape in 2001.

These students from Warrensville Heights Middle School in Warrensville, Ohio, won the 2019 PRT Cram with the help of the Mountaineer and WVU students at a record 51 people that year.

An unlikely passenger participated in the 2018 PRT Cram.

The all-time official PRT Cram record stands at 97 people — from this competition in 2000.

FROM TEST TRACK TO TEACHING TOOL

Today, professors use the PRT in ways its designers never imagined. It has become a living classroom for lessons in engineering, automation, and public policy. Students study its control systems, its maintenance challenges, its longevity as a federal experiment that outlasted its peers.

For some, it’s a case study in bold innovation. For others, it’s a warning about cost overruns and the difficulty of scaling futuristic ideas. Either way, it persists — and it teaches.

Mohamed Hefeida, teaching associate professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and computer engineering student Michael Barchett built a scale model of the PRT system in the Statler College Critical Infrastructure Security Lab. Almost a dozen engineering courses use the model as a hands-on testbed for students to gain real-world experience with industrial-grade equipment used in automation and control of many types of facilities.

“It offers students lessons that no textbook can fully deliver,” Hefeida said. “It bridges theory and practice by allowing students to build, program, and troubleshoot a real system — experiences that deepen their understanding far beyond formulas and diagrams. This hands-on exposure cultivates engineering intuition, resilience in the face of failure, and a collaborative mindset — skills that are crucial in the lab, the workplace, and the field, but rarely developed at the desk.”

Another Statler College faculty member, Brian Woerner, also sees the system’s value in the classroom. For roughly 5 consecutive semesters, Woerner taught a computer science and electrical engineering capstone lab in which seniors worked to build a small unit to monitor the performance of PRT cars. Woerner’s students met and worked with PRT personnel on the project and were able to design both hardware and software that can track location, movement, energy usage, and much more.

“At some point, we’d love to have this running (on cars) and taking data,” he explained. “There is a pretty strong expertise for power systems in our department, and monitoring the PRT system long term would mean being able to determine things like how much energy the University saves by moving students this way as opposed to buses, and that sort of thing. This kind of information could be useful when considering future maintenance and development of the system, not to mention providing a living lab where our students could see the impact of their work in real time.”

A scale model of the PRT system in the Statler College allows nearly a dozen engineering courses to use it as a hands-on testbed to gain real-world experience with industrial-grade equipment used in automation.

A scaled version of the PRT is used for engineering classes.

Mohamed Hefeida (seen here), of the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and computer engineering student Michael Barchett built a scale model of the PRT system.

AN ICON OF MORGANTOWN

Ask any WVU alum about their time on campus and chances are they’ll have a PRT story. Cramming in with friends on a game day, riding alone late at night tucked safely within its walls as the car moves quietly over darkened streets, last-minute material review for that big test that could determine everything, admiring the fall leaves and the winter flakes, meeting eventual husbands and wives and making big decisions about the future — all of the stuff that life is made up of has likely happened within the confines of these little gold-and-blue cars.

For outsiders, the PRT is a curiosity. For alumni and even locals, it’s part of the fabric of life. It has become something more than a machine — it’s shorthand for Morgantown’s identity. And on any weekday morning, cars still glide into their stations, doors opening with a sigh, students swiping their IDs, shuffling into the seats, and taking off again with a whir. The system’s hum and rhythm is the same as it was in 1972.

Fifty years later, the PRT remains both ordinary and extraordinary. A daily commute and a living experiment. A workhorse and a time capsule. And maybe, just maybe, a reminder that even the most ambitious dreams can last.

Timothy Eads, Mountaineer mascot for 2019-2020, helped a group of WVU staff and middle school students from Ohio win the 2019 PRT Cram.

Monongalia County Commissioner Tom Bloom joins WVU President Michael T. Benson, with PRT frisbees in hand, on a tour of the PRT control station.

A snowy campus scene.

PRT carts lined up and ready to go.

WVU is celebrating 50 years of its PRT in 2025.

Students roam up and down the steps at the Beechurst PRT Station.

After 50 years, the WVU PRT is still running strong.

Students board the PRT at the Beechurst Station.

WVU President Michael T. Benson takes a ride on the PRT in his first fall semester on campus.

Here’s to 50 more years, and more, for the WVU PRT.

Footnotes

Story by Holly Leleux-Thubron. Photos by Hunter Given, Scott Lituchy, Megan Rinker, Jennifer Shephard, and courtesy of the West Virginia Regional and History Collection at WVU.

FootNotes

Story by Holly Leleux-Thubron. Photos by Hunter Given, Scott Lituchy, Megan Rinker, Jennifer Shephard, and courtesy of the West Virginia Regional and History Collection at WVU.

© 2026 West Virginia University

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