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Ha Long Bay
World’s Largest Aerial Tram Opens for Business
The Nu Hoang Cable Car’s 230-person cabins carried their first public passengers across Ha Long Bay in Vietnam Saturday after a dedication with owner Sun Group, builder Doppelmayr/Garaventa and representatives from the Guinness Book of World Records. The spectacular 7,100′ reversible aerial tramway crushes records for the largest cabins and tallest towers of any lift worldwide.
Meaning Queen in English, the Nu Hoang Cable Car links Ha Long City with Ba Deo Hill and a huge observation wheel. It’s part of a $270 million, 500-acre development called Sun World Ha Long Park. The taller of the tramway’s two concrete tripod towers is 619 feet while the other is only 436 feet. The old record was 373 feet on a tramway in Austria built in 1966.
CWA built the monster red and yellow Kronos cabins in sections and shipped them to Ha Long for assembly. Each cabin has two levels and six sets of doors! With these new cabins, the double-decker, 200-passenger Vanoise Express in France loses the title of world’s largest tram.
The Queen is the latest mega lift project for Doppelmayr and Vietnam’s Sun Group, which also operates the world’s second longest gondola and the longest 3S. In 2015, Sun Group ordered an even longer 3S to link three islands and the mainland on Vietnam’s Southern Coast. This stunning 26,000 foot gondola will become the world’s longest lift of any type when it opens in the second quarter of 2017.
CWA Delivers Monster Cabins for Ha Long Queen
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.
News Roundup: Gearbox Trouble at Sugarloaf
- Sugarloaf’s Whiffletree high speed quad (shown above) will be down 1-2 weeks while its gearbox gets rebuilt in Michigan for the second time in six months. Cone Drive rebuilt the gearbox in question last Fall and it was back in action a mere two months before failing on Saturday. Whiffletree is a 1997 Garaventa CTEC Stealth detachable at a mountain that’s had more than its fair share of lift setbacks.
- Doppelmayr’s latest Wir magazine is online. Some article highlights: the Penkenbahn 3S gondola turns 6.5 degrees mid-line and Park City’s new gondola transitions between two different line gauges.
- Leitner Ropeways will break ground on a two-stage gondola in Berlin March 26th to serve guests of the city’s 2017 horticultural expo. Doppelmayr built temporary gondolas at similar expos in 2009 and 2011. Must be nice to spend millions on lifts for four months of temporary operation! To be fair, Whistler did something similar for the Olympics.
- Garaventa crews pulling rope 600 feet above Ha Long Bay but they took some time off to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The world’s largest aerial tramway opens next month.
- The Telluride-Mountain Village gondola transit system, built by CTEC in 1992, has clocked 100,000 hours and elected officials are trying to figure out how to modernize it.
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