RailroadsGiveSkiers“ALift”

By:KenBuehler

In 1936 the Union Pacific Railroad took advantage of the growing popularity of winter sports and opened Sun Valley, a company-owned ski resort area, served by Union Pacific (UP), north of Boise, Idaho. It was big and it was new and came with an improvement in skiing technology that is still in use today.

The problem was getting many more skiers to the top of the hill safer and faster than existing rope tows or T-bars.

Jim Curran was a structural engineer working for UP in the company shops in Omaha, a long way from Idaho. He came up with an idea based on a system he saw in Central America used to load bananas onto boats. Suspended overhead was a moving cable from which hooks were attached to carry bunches of bananas. Curran’s idea was to replace the hooks with chairs.

To test his new chairlift in flat Nebraska, they attached a prototype to the side of a truck and ran it down the highway with “test dummies” (UP employees?) wearing roller skates instead of skies to get on and off the moving chair. They determined that the best speed for comfort and safety was between four and five miles an hour and that determined the speed of the overhead cable at Sun Valley. There are no reports on the results of speed tests faster than five miles an hour.

Every sky hill in the world now uses chairlifts, an idea first developed in 1936 by the Union Pacific Railroad.