Vail’s new 10-passenger Gondola One, the main lift out of the original Vail Village, makes one heck of a statement. It replaces the 27-year-old Vista Bahn, which was almost as much of a signature lift when it replaced Vail’s original Gondola One back in 1986. The new One increases uphill capacity by 50 percent, cuts ride time by a minute and a half, and offers previously unexpected amenities: padded faux-leather seats (real leather would be cruel), heated cabins, and top-to-bottom wifi connectivity among them. And it’s just as much of a mechanical marvel, too.

Vail had several objectives with Gondola One. First, to provide greater capacity and speedier access to Mid-Vail, the popular high-alpine area above Vail Village and a main gateway to the famed Back Bowls. Second, to exceed expectations for style, comfort and convenience. Third, increase off-season utility of Mid-Vail. And fourth, make this an act of patriotism by building the lift in the U.S., to the fullest extent possible.

Consider it mission accomplished.

Let’s start at the bottom. The sleek open terminal design is typical of modern gondola design. Heated pavers surround the loading area, and extend nearly to the gondolas themselves; a concrete apron bridges the two. The pavers are set at snow level for easy access.

The open design, coupled with a long loading area, helps achieve the lift’s maximum capacity. It eliminates the entrance bottleneck that comes with an enclosed terminal, and provides a great deal of flexibility when it comes to crowd handling. Cabins are in the loading area for 40 seconds each, spaced at 10 second intervals. There are four cabins with doors open at all times. It takes a sizable staff to assist with loading at peak times.

“It requires a very special maze area to handle that many people, check tickets, it takes lots of special effort,” says Jon Mauch of Leitner-Poma. “Vail put a lot of thought into it, that’s part of what makes it work.”

Once on board, guests travel 1,200 feet per minute, 20 percent faster than most high-speed quads and other gondolas. Ride time for the 9,300-foot length has been cut to 7.5 minutes from the Vista Bahn’s 9 minutes. The lift rises a bit over 2,000 feet.


CABIN FEVER
The cabins themselves are a new design, the first in North America with seating for 10—two rows of five, facing each other. French manufacturer Sigma, a division of Leitner-Poma, created the cabins, which are tall and mostly plexiglass. “We really like the look of it,” says lift maintenance manager Todd Ruoff. “It’s got a lot of glass, and it’s very easy to load standing up, as opposed to some of the shorter cabins you might see. And it has a radio system for emergency communications.”

The padded seats are heated, too. “A conductor rail in the station makes contact with power, the seats are heated up, and power is cut off when the cabins leave the station. A lot of guests are commenting on that,” Mauch notes.

Vail’s Clyde Wiessner, director of lift maintenance, and Scott "Geno" Leslie, lift maintenance manager, designed the ski and board racks on the outside so that they can accommodate 10 pairs of wide skis and 8 snowboards. “It took a lot of testing and design. We feel very confident that we can fit everything short of a ski bike in there,” says Ruoff.

LED lighting under the seats provides ambient light for evening use, and there are lights on the outside of both uphill and downhill sides of the cabin. “So as you’re driving the I-70 corridor, you’re going to see a strong of pearls going up the liftline,” Wiessner says.

“The lights are going to be controlled by radio signal from the control room, so we can turn the lights on or off via radio frequency down to the Kenwood system in the cabins. There’s a one-way communication system from the control room to the cabins for emergency use. Or maybe to greet a bride or groom,” Wiessner adds.

With Vail’s full-on adoption of social media in mind, guests have a final bennie: wifi capability from bottom to top, thanks to a string of wireless repeaters stationed along the liftline.


TERMINAL LIFE
The top and bottom terminals themselves are longer than for a high-speed quad, mechanically, but otherwise, they are not terribly unusual. The terminal conveyance system for the cabins uses 54 tires per side, plus 16 on the contours. The main hydraulic tensioning rams at the bottom terminal have 21.6 feet of travel.

The terminals are, however, energy-efficient in every possible way. “The specially insulated windows, top and bottom, mean we use about a quarter of the power our other terminals use,” says Ruoff. “It stays very comfortable, not only for us but for all the equipment, all year round. In fact, on a really sunny day, the heaters barely run upstairs.”

The top terminal in some outward ways mirrors the bottom. It’s an open terminal, with heated pavers in the loading/unloading zone, and guests walk off at snow level. It’s sandwiched between the Mid-Vail restaurant and lodge and the new maintenance and storage barn. That places the top terminal closer to Mid-Vail than that of the old Vista Bahn.

The drive configuration in the top terminal and the 16,600-square-foot storage and maintenance barn adjacent to it are among the lift’s significant features.

The top terminal houses a sophisticated motor setup that allows for a great deal of redundancy in the drive and backup systems, to ensure that Gondola One runs no matter what. Leitner-Poma has learned a lot about the need for and utility of redundancy from building the Roosevelt Island tram in New York City, which runs nearly 24/7. “This gondola was modeled after that in many ways,” Wiessner says.

“There are four primary motors in the one gearbox,” he explains. “Two of them will drive the lift on primary drive, at full speed on full capacity, under normal situations. The secondary primary drive is two parallel motors that can also drive the lift at full capacity and 100 percent speed. We can also take the secondary drives and drive with one motor or the other motor at 50 percent speed, 100 percent capacity.

“I just described six different modes of operation. And the motors are all the same, the same exact design; so with an overhead trolley, in one evening, if we had a problem, we could switch that one motor out with one of the others. So we have that redundancy as well.” Since the motors each weigh 10,000 pounds, that’s a heavy-duty trolley.

There are also twin 250 hp evacuation motors. “The tertiary drive, a ring and pinion on the bullwheel, is completely separate from the primary drives,” says Mauch, “and so are the tertiary’s AC drives, which are even kept in a separate room, in case of fire. And the wiring is separate.”

Wait, there’s more: “The bullwheel can be disengaged from the gearbox, so if the gearbox were to freeze up, we could run the lift with the evacuation drives to clear the line,” Wiessner says. “Our goal is to not leave our guests hanging.”

And the AC drives are also identical, and therefore redundant. In all, there are 13 or 14 different drive combinations. It will take an extraordinary event to bring this lift to more than a temporary halt.

The AC drives are also very efficient. “Those VFDs can provide unity power factor; they have very fast firing sequences. They are super smart, and therefore efficient,” Mauch says. “They use 40 to 50 percent less energy for the same horsepower [compared to older systems].”

Since all the drives are electric, what happens in case of a power outage or failure? Two 750 kW Cummins diesel generators kick in to provide electricity. “Each of them provides a lot of power—enough to power probably 1,200 homes,” says Ruoff.

“Both will be kept at operating temperature 24/7, so when the power drops out they automatically fire up and come up to full rpm. They will automatically make the transfer from Holy Cross [utility] power to generator power,” Wiessner says. “The operators will simply press a reset button and a restart button and the lift will start operating again. We become our own power plant up here.” The gondola can operate at full capacity and maximum speed under generator power.


INVESTMENT PROTECTION
The storage barn itself is luxurious, relatively speaking. There are rails leading to and from the barn off the top terminal. Every night, Vail clears the line and stores the cabins on rails in the barn, where they can dry out protected from the elements. There are two storage rows on the lower level; an elevator raises cabins to four rows on the top level, where there are also a couple of maintenance bays for regular cleaning and repair work. In the morning, the process is reversed, and the lift prepared to receive its customers.

“The cabins come out in the morning, frost free, windows aren’t steamed up, they have had a chance to dry out,” Wiessner says. “Otherwise, a lot of the time, moisture builds up in the cabins and they start to smell musty or wet. But that isn’t a problem here.

“We feel this is a good way to protect our investment in the cabins. Twenty years from now our cabins will look much better than if they were stored out on line.

HEAVY DUTY
The lift will be a workhorse, operating about 3,200 hours a year. That’s based on normal winter skier/rider operating hours of 8:30 to 4, and for foot traffic until about 11 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday evenings. Summer hours are expected to be similar. It is often 2 a.m. before the night-shift lift crews clear the line and descend to their work room.

About 70 percent of the lift was made in the U.S. at Leitner-Poma’s Grand Junction, Colo., facility. That made it easier to transport the components to Vail, but by no means was it a simple task. The top terminal motor frame, for instance, weighs 71,000 pounds, and each 950 hp motor adds 10,000 pounds. The head was assembled at Grand Junction, and the Leitner-Poma team determined it was too bulky to transport. So they disassembled it. The accelerator mechanisms and the contours shipped as five pieces, which were then assembled on site.

The haul rope, manufactured by ArcelorMittal (formerly known as Technor), was a project, too. The 56 mm-diameter (2.2 inches) rope arrived on one massive spool, and weighed 173,000 pounds. With the truck, the total weighed close to 250,000 pounds. Splicing involved a crew of 15 from Leitner-Poma, and another 15 from Vail; the weaving process added dozens more.

“We wanted it in one piece,” says Ruoff. “It’s easier for us, since there’s only one splice. It was a challenge getting it here, but we worked it out.”

Everything is a bit more massive on the One. “The lift profile and line machinery are designed like the big Leitner European systems,” says Mauch. “It uses Leitner 550 mm sheaves in large configurations. They are larger capacity in both rope size and carrying weight. Also, there are longer spans; where typically a gondola of this length would need around 30 towers, instead there are 23.”

The lift has opened to mostly rave reviews. But some Vail locals and regulars wanted more: a single ride right to the top of the mountain. Why didn’t Vail do that, and really speed access to the back bowls, they groused? The short answer: adding an angle station would create traffic problems at Mid-Vail, and steeply escalate the cost. Vail plans to upgrade the Chair 4 high-speed quad at Mid-Vail in the near future, and increase capacity, but that hasn’t satisfied the big dreamers.

Ah, well. You can’t please all the people all the time, even if you’re Vail.