The world's three main monorail builders are all expressing interest in designing, building, operating and maintaining Seattle's new monorail.

MTrans is a monorail company from Malaysia that calls itself "an urban transit system provider." It wants to compete with the other two monorail builders, Hitachi, which is part of Cascadia Monorail Co., and Bombardier, part of Team Monorail.

MTrans has 700 employees and is based in Kuala Lumpur. In 1999, MTrans completed a 19-mile monorail line through the Malaysian capital.

The company is currently building a 4.1-mile monorail in Gangnam, South Korea. Last March, MTrans announced plans to build a 9.3-mile monorail in New Delhi, in partnership with Delhi and the Indian government.

Last week, MTrans officials called Kristina Hill, acting chairwoman of the Seattle Monorail Project board of directors, to let her know they are interested in building the Green Line. MTrans made its entrance on the Seattle stage just as Team Monorail, a consortium of companies which previously dropped out of the bidding, expressed renewed interest in the project.

None of this pleased officials from Cascadia Monorail Co. because they have already negotiated a contract with the Seattle Monorail Project and are awaiting approval of the contract by the project's board of directors. The board has until mid-December to decide.

The sudden appearance of MTrans and the re-emergence of Team Monorail also have put the Monorail Project's board of directors into an ethics discussion. After all, it was Cascadia Monorail Co. and Team Monorail who competed for months to win the design-build-operate-maintain contract. Then Team Monorail dropped out of the race before submitting its bid, which left Cascadia as the sole competitor.

However, the proposed financial package to pay for the Green Line unravels when the public learned it would have to pay $11 billion over a half-century to clear the debt. That's when Cascadia's new and former competitors began sniffing the air around the elevated project.

The Seattle Monorail Project board of directors continues its series of weekly meetings to sort out what to do next to try and save the monorail project.

Tim St. Clair can be reached at tstclair@robinsonnews.com or 932.0300.