All photos credit Skyscrapercity forum user tmanhthang
We now know what the world’s largest tramway cabins look like. One bright yellow and the other red, CWA’s largest Kronos cabins built to date will hold 230 passengers plus one operator each with six sets of doors on two levels. They will soon be hung on the Ha Long Queen cable car, whose track cables already stretch 5,000 feet across Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay at heights up to 617 feet. The Queen will supplant the 200-passenger Vanoise Express as the world’s highest capacity aerial tram when it opens early this summer.
The world’s largest gondola-based public transit network, Mi Teleférico “My Cable,” announced on social media this week it has ordered a 9th gondola from Doppelmayr for delivery in 2019. The Linea Plateada (Silver Line) will connect the existing Yellow/Red and under construction Purple/Blue lines in Bolivia’s capitol city of La Paz. When complete, it will connect nine separate lines and 42 miles of cable together for the first time.
The brainchild of President Evo Morales, Bolivia went all-in on gondolas in 2012, ordering three lines (with 4 haul ropes, 11 stations and 450 cabins) for phase one. The experiment proved wildly successful, offering safe, clean and reliable transport to the masses in La Paz and neighboring El Alto. Less than two months after the first gondola opened, President Morales announced construction of five additional lines on July 1, 2015.
Not many public transit systems are as revered as this one, which has more than 160,000 likes on Facebook (the largest subway system in the world, New York’s MTA, has just 50,000.) Mi Teleférico’s slogan is Uniting Our Lives and it serves more than 100,000 passengers every weekday. For 40 cents a trip, riders even get free wi-fi.
More pictures and details are filtering out from Hochgurgl, Austria where the Kirchenkarbahn opened Dec. 10th. This 10-passenger gondola wouldn’t be particularly notable but for the fact that it’s Doppelmayr’s first production model of the next-generation detachable lift called D-Line.
First a little history. Doppelmayr introduced the Uni-G terminal in 2000, replacing the “Spacejet” model of the 1990s. After the merger of Doppelmayr and Garaventa in 2002, the company continued to offer Stealth III and Uni-G detachable lifts in the US. In 2003, Doppelmayr CTEC added a North American-design called the Uni-GS and built 88 of them before discontinuing the model in 2009. With the Stealth gone since 2004, the Uni-G became the only Doppelmayr detachable product worldwide until now.
Doppelmayr graphic shows terminals getting shorter over the years despite faster line speeds.
German architect Werner Sobek designed the D-Line terminal and he’s apparently well known-enough to have an English Wikipedia page. His enclosure is almost entirely composed of windows with a modern, boxy look that I’m not sold on. Setting appearance aside, Doppelmayr says D-Line can support line speeds of up to 7 m/s or 1,378 feet a minute. This is a big deal; the fastest circulating ropeway I know of today maxes out at 1,212 FPM. The Kirchenkarbahn uses a gearbox from Eisenbeiss and controls from Frey Austria.
Sunshine Village is one of two ski resorts in North America with access provided by gondola rather than road, the other being Silver Mountain in Idaho. Visitors park at the end of Sunshine Road and transfer to a Poma gondola for a 17 minute ride to Sunshine Village. Along the way there are two angle stations, one where doors stay closed and the other with loading/unloading at Goat’s Eye Mountain. All three sections share one haul rope driven by a 2,000 HP electric motor underneath the top terminal. The Goat’s Eye angle station has indoor cabin storage and there are additional maintenance rails at each end.
When opened on November 22, 2001, Poma claimed the Sunshine Village Gondola was the world’s fastest 8-passenger gondola with a max speed of 1,200 feet per minute. I don’t believe this was ever true as Whiteface’s Cloudsplitter Gondola opened two years earlier and can run 1,212 fpm. There are now at least 15 gondolas in North America that can do 1,200 feet a minute or faster. Regardless, Sunshine’s gondola is an impressive machine that moves 2,800 people per hour in each direction 15+ hours per day. It cost $16 million to build.
A motor room under the bottom dock houses electric motors, two generators, three braking systems and two evacuation drives.
The $31 million Jackson Hole Aerial Tram is the most expensive lift ever built at a US ski area. Constructed by Garaventa over 20 months, the new tram opened to great fanfare on December 20, 2008. It can move a hundred people 4,083 vertical feet in under nine minutes. Compared with a detachable lift, the tram is a relatively simple machine built on a massive scale.
The view from carriage level just above tower 2.
Like most jig-back aerial tramways, there are four track ropes and a single haul rope that that drives both cabins. All five wire ropes were manufactured by Fatzer in Switzerland. Five towers support the line; towers 1 and 2 are the tallest and furthest apart. Two CWA Kronos cabins move 650 passengers per hour per direction at a maximum speed of 10 m/s. Slope length is 12,463 feet.
Two new aerial tramways are about to open on the Italian side of Mont Blanc that will be among the steepest in the world. This is Doppelmayr’s largest project ever on Leitner’s home turf. The €110 million contract was awarded in late 2011 and construction began in 2012. Two sets of 80-passenger cabins will ascend a crazy 7,093 vertical feet in ten minutes. For comparison, Palm Springs’ tram does 5,873 feet in 12 minutes, Jackson Hole’s 4,084 feet in nine minutes.
Mont Blanc will have CWA’s first fully-rotating cabins.
Mont Blanc can be accessed from both the Italian and French sides. There is also a highway tunnel under the mountain, but that’s not nearly as cool. The existing setup on the Italian side requires riding three lifts built in the 40s and 50s to reach Point Helbronner at 11,358 feet. The French side has two tramways, the famous Aguille du Midi 1 & 2 that reach 12,392 feet. Connecting the French and Italian summits is a 3.1 mile bi-cable pulse gondola that opened in 1957.
Both new trams will have the world’s first 360-degree rotating cabins (others like the Palm Springs Tramway have only rotating floors.) Built by CWA, these 80-passenger cabins will feature heating, air conditioning and video screens showing live camera views.
System Statistics
Both sections will be in new alignments as shown in Google Maps above. The first section ascends from the village of Entreves to a mid-station called Le Pavillon with three towers along the way. It will move 600 passengers per hour with a four minute ride. The second section from Le Pavillon to Point Helbronner has only two towers and ascends over 4,000 feet in six minutes. Both sections will operate year-round once they open in mid-June.
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