Portland Aerial Tram

The Portland Aerial Tram is an aerial tramway in Portland (Oregon ), United States, connecting the south of the city center, the suburb of South Waterfront with the Oregon Health and Science University, which is on the located above the town of Marquam Hill a larger university and hospital district and They also expands in the South Waterfront District.

The Portland Aerial Tram is the second cable car in the United States (after Roosevelt Iceland Tramway in New York City ), which primarily serves the public transport system in addition to various funicular railways in the United States.

It was jointly funded by OHSU, the city of Portland and property owners from the South Waterfront, part of the city and is operated by OHSU. It is used primarily to staff, patients and visitors to the OHSU and their clinics, but is generally available as part of the public transport of the city of Portland. Employees and students of the OHSU ride for free, others require a return ticket. The train does not run on public holidays and not on winter Sundays.

The district Marquam Hill was only accessible via a narrow, winding road. After long and detailed discussions on various options, it was decided in 1999 for a cable car as the best connection. An international architectural competition ended in 2003 with the appointment of a resident in Zurich and Los Angeles architecture firms with the planning of the system. The actual cable car was designed and created by Doppelmayr and its American subsidiary Doppelmayr CTEC, the cabins supplied the Swiss company Gangloff. Doppelmayr is also responsible for the operation of the cable car, under a contract with the OHSU.

The cable car was opened in December 2006 for the clinical staff and the students, and on 27 January 2007 for the general public. In May 2009, the cable car was one of its three millionth passenger.

The Portland Aerial Tram is an aerial tramway with two track ropes (49 mm) and a circumferential tension cable. The horizontal length is 1033 m, the height difference of 145 m. While the valley station is a conventional reinforced concrete construction, the hill station was built as a 60 m high steel structure on the steep slope in front of an existing building and connected by a steel girder bridge with this building. The 60 -meter-high cable car tower was not, as usual, built for aesthetic reasons than steel lattice mast, rather than curved, oblique steel body with concrete core up to 16 m deep piles. The support cables are fixed at the base station, in which there are the drives. The tension weights hanging in the hill station. The two cabins each hold 78 people plus the cabin companion. You can drive at wind speeds of up to 80 km / hr.