The season is open - both for winter vacationers and for ski lifts and their drives
The weather is ideal, the snow perfectly prepared for a speedy descent, skis are clipped into place, helmets are on – there’s a big crowd at the ski lift. One after another, skiers climb aboard and head up the piste.
Dependable and untiring, the cable pulls adventure-hungry winter athletes ever upwards to the deep powder snow or the pistes of various classifications from blue to black – every day, every week, every season.
But then suddenly there’s a jolt and the ski lift comes to a stop. Everyone cranes their necks upwards – who’s fallen off now? It must be a newbie, hopelessly entangled in their skis or poles... Fortunately, the safety technology is working perfectly and the whole system came to a stop immediately.
Everything OK? Yes, the newbie has gotten back up and out of the way. And so the journey continues.
Everything OK in the cable car? It is for the skiers, anyway. They’re on vacation and not so easily upset – particularly when they feel safe and the car soon starts moving again.
What about the ski lift itself? All good! The system responded as it should and the gear unit and motor are once again running as smoothly as ever in normal operation. The operators are very happy, too.
What keeps ski tows, chairlifts and cable cars moving safely?
Did you know that countless ski lifts and cable cars in the Alps are scaling dizzying heights safely and reliably thanks to drive engineering and skilled service from SEW-EURODRIVE?
If you are in the Swiss resort of Davos this year, it won’t be hard to find the Jakobshorn cable car, which uses a 250 kNm industrial gear unit from the X series and a 250 kW AC motor from SEW-EURODRIVE to move up to 1220 people an hour. Two cars that each hold 100 passengers and travel at a speed of 10 meters per second connect the valley station in Davos-Platz with the mountain station on Jschalp. The entire drive train, including couplings, was project engineered and delivered by our Swiss agency Alfred Imhof AG.
The conscientious operators of systems like these know they have a partner they can really rely on in SEW-EURODRIVE, whether they are renovating an existing system – when we can even get third-party elements as good as new – or designing new lift facilities. We have the expertise and the perfect product portfolio for producing customized end-to-end solutions
In terms of products, the most suitable are the powerful and exceptionally robust industrial gear units from our X series. Companies that operate or fit out cable cars of all shapes and sizes find that opting for these robust and dependable units is an easy decision. After all, they need large gear units that are especially durable and reliable and exceptionally maintenance friendly – and those are precisely the requirements that the industrial gear units in the X series have been designed to meet.
Additional drive technology components that have proven themselves to be ideal solutions in countless applications include our AC motors in the DR.. modular motor system. These motors satisfy the most important international standards, can be combined in millions of different configurations and cover an impressive performance range up to 250 kW.
