Tram/train dream still on rails
City to hire consultant to select best concept
Susan Ruttan
The Edmonton Journal
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
EDMONTON - Here's the dream: Atop Grierson Hill sits Downtown East, the redevelopment of a grungy part of the city centre into a smart shopping and housing area. Below is Louise McKinney Park, an ambitious oasis built on the terraces that cascade down the hill to the river.
And connecting the two projects? Some kind of machine to carry people up and down the hill.
It could be a funicular railway, a little train running up and down the hill on tracks. Or it could be an aerial tram riding a cable along the same route. City planners see it as the key to making Louise McKinney Park a popular downtown destination for locals and tourists alike.
"It's always been a dream of ours -- of everyone in the city, I think -- that people who aren't terribly athletic can get up and down into the river valley," says Bob Caldwell, special projects manager for the city planning department.
The dream, however, faces challenges both financial and geological.
Budget-cutting has chopped in half the 2007 funding for Downtown East. Caldwell has salvaged $30,000 out of the remaining $500,000 Downtown East budget to keep the lift idea alive.
With the salvaged money, he plans to hire a consultant who can help determine what will suit the hill best, a funicular or a tram. He hopes to have an answer in the next year.
The geology of the area poses a challenge, too. Edmonton's riverbanks are made of deep soil and clay, not bedrock, Caldwell says. That makes them unstable.
"We've rebuilt Grierson Hill twice in my time here," he says. "Slides are common. The city has a large, large budget for slide repairs, always has."
A funicular would travel over a new bridge across Grierson Hill Road and make its first stop on the upper terrace of Louise McKinney Park.
The train car would then continue down the slope and make its final stop in the park's riverfront plaza, an area slated to have street vendors, rollerblade rentals and eventually a cafe.
Building a train track on a slope that tends to crumble won't be easy.
"The engineering of something like this is a very complex piece," Caldwell says.
With an aerial tram, engineers would have to worry about ground stability only at the pillars where the tram is anchored. And there would be no need for a bridge, since the tram cars would glide over the road on the cable.
But the aerial tram has its own problems. The tram line will have to be high enough to pass over the vehicles on Grierson Hill Road, yet it's supposed to have a stop on the park's upper terrace right below the road.
In fact, Caldwell says, the platform for that upper terrace stop could be three metres off the ground. People getting off the tram might have to reach the ground by elevator or stairs -- hardly an ideal situation. Also unanswered is whether the lift should have one car or two, how big the cars should be and whether it would be staffed or automated.
"Maybe you could just put in a toonie and push a button and along comes the lift," says parks planner Gabriele Barry.
The world's newest aerial tram opened Jan. 27 in Portland, Ore., carrying passengers from the city's waterfront to a university on a mountain. Fans of the Portland Aerial Tram see it as a defining feature of the city, like Seattle's Space Needle or San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Critics point to its cost, which rose from $15 million to $57 million US.
A lot of things pushed up the cost of the Portland Aerial Tram, says Caldwell, including the fact the tram cars travelled over an upscale neighbourhood that made a number of demands.
However, he warns that the Edmonton system "may require a very large order expenditure" -- perhaps $10 million to $15 million.
Coun. Michael Phair likes the idea of a funicular or tram, but he cautions against underestimating the cost.
"I don't want people to think it's only going to be a few million dollars," Phair said.
He expects the final bill would be more than $15 million.
Once the city gets more work done on the Downtown East revitalization and on McKinney Park, he said, the lift idea would make more sense.
"I think it's going to be a little bit of time yet before we do it, a couple of years anyway."
GOING UP
- The world went crazy for funicular railways in the late 1800s.
Pittsburgh once had more than a dozen and Canadian cities, such as Hamilton, Niagara Falls and Edmonton, had funiculars, too.
- The song Funiculi, Funicula was written by Italian journalist Peppino Turco and composer Luigi Denza in 1880 to commemorate the opening of the first funicular on Mount Vesuvius.
- The Edmonton Incline Railway, opened in 1908 by the Chateau Lacombe, carried horses, carts and pedestrians between the river valley and downtown. It closed in 1913 with the opening of the High Level Bridge.
GOING DOWN
- In 2006, passengers on the Roosevelt Island Tramway carrying commuters across a river to Manhattan were stuck for up to 12 hours when the tram stopped working. All were rescued.
- In 1996, two tourists died and 14 were injured when a cable on the Quebec City funicular snapped and the car plunged down the hill. The funicular was rebuilt and reopened the next year.
THE OPTIONS
- A funicular railway, or incline railway, is a transit car that runs up a hill on train tracks attached to a cable.
- An aerial tram is a transit car attached to a cable that travels through the air.
SEE MORE
For links to information, photos and videos about funiculars and aerial trams, including Mario Lanza's version of Funiculi, Funicula, go to
www.edmontonjournal.com.
Ran with fact boxes "Going Up", "Going Down", "The Options", and "See More", which have been appended to this story.
© The Edmonton Journal 2007
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
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