The Pearlridge Monorail, originally called Pali Momi Express, has been running since 1977. It is still the only mall in the United States to have a monorail connecting two phases of a shopping mall. The monorail, however, has been down for the past few months and has not returned to service yet. The Monorail train was manufactured by Rohr Industries, who was based in Chula Vista, California. Rohr has been a major manufacturer for transit/attraction applications such as BART's older trains, or People Mover in Walt Disney World. They are now a defunct company. The Monorail is powered by electricity and rubber wheels, but has had many flaws recently due to its discontinuation of production. Since Pearlridge was the only customer of this exact model of train, it was discontinued years later, but luckily was preserved to still run. The train’s old age and low supply have contributed to its frequent breakdowns— concluding with it being out of service the whole summer.

Since Pearlridge made Phase 2 (now Downtown or Wai Makai), they wanted to futurize the shopping center and make it easier to head to Phase 2 from Phase 1 (now Uptown or Mauka). After envisioning the Monorail, they contracted Rohr Industries $1,000,000 to build the half kilometer Monorail system. The line was supposed to be completed on September of 1975, but due to problems such as construction delays, they pushed back the completion date to November. By that time, they pushed the completion date back another 2 months. After all those problems, it was ready for testing in June 1976. Trial phases lasted from a few weeks to several months. In July of 1976, they had to modify some of the line due to the train colliding on certain sidings, then another issue struck. After they fixed that, there came electricity issues, such as improper installations etc, which pushed the delays even further. Safety checks needed to be held by the Department on the line of the monorail. It needed to be checked because of its route, 40 feet going across the parking lot.

Since the train was manufactured in a time when being fully autonomous wasn’t a thing, someone needed to inspect the train. Jake’s Associates was called by Pearlridge Management to check the life of the monorail and what they could do to upgrade it. After they found out the train has a long life left, and can be upgraded in certain areas, they had upgrades done to make it fully autonomous. These upgrades involved closing down the monorail for a long time and removing the operators. Unfortunately though, the monorail has slowed down its speed since the upgrades. People have lost interest in using the rail lately, as the price to ride has become more expensive. The price has risen to a dollar from its original 25 cents, being considered expensive by the community. Because the monorail is also an aging system, it has been constantly breaking down. Since the Monorail has had constant breakdowns, this has led some people not to hold their breath on the application anymore. This was not an image Pearlridge wanted. But sadly, in today's times, many things are expensive now. It is more difficult to service the monorail since parts are hard to find for the train. Due to the fact that the ridership has been decreasing significantly, the train is seen as useless now. It now takes 5 minutes for one trip. Its current state is the opposite of what it was marketed for when it was released. Since the opening of Skyline on June 30th, and its distance and fare, people are now making Skyline their Pearlridge Monorail joyride instead since the holo card fare costs only $3 for a faster, and longer ride, compared to Pearlridge’s $1 fare with a slower and shorter ride. Skyline allows you to move around and see beautiful views. It is very similar to Pearlridge Monorail since it also hovers over Pearl Harbor. Even when Skyline opened, Pearlridge still never opened up the Monorail to let people ride another train, showing how much O’ahu and Hawaii have innovated. I think that there’s more potential to it since it's been an icon to Hawaii for a long time. It is the reason why Pearlridge is famous, and popular every year. Now because maintenance has been so long, it has been believed by many people that Pearlridge has shut it down, or closed the line completely. Since its prolonged closure, more people have lost faith in the monorail and Pearlridge as a whole.