Mid-February is the goal for resumption of Tram service, Red Blomer, president of American Tramways Inc., said this week.

The Tram has been shut down since November 24, when American Tramways began a major repair and maintenance project.  The work was nearly finished during the week of December 16 when the company’s technicians committed one of the nightmarish mistakes of the aerial Tramway and ski-lift industry: In connecting a new haul rope to the Tram cabin assemblies, they trimmed the excess cable too much, leaving it a little over eight feet short of the length necessary to allow both cabins to dock in their proper places.

The mistake, a “human error,” as Blomer called it, wasn’t noticed until the workers tried to dock the cabins.

On December 21, one day after the Tram’s scheduled resumption of service, American Tramways, which is based in Watertown, N.Y., abruptly laid off its entire Roosevelt Island work force.  The employees had been helping with the project.  Twenty-one people were out of work: four supervisors, including the lead supervisor, Armando Cordova, three mechanics, nine cabin attendants and four station attendants, all members of the International Union of Operating Engineers, plus one nonunion cashier.  One worker is putting in a few hours a week checking and maintaining the correct tension on the cables.

The workers were left without their regular paychecks after the holidays and now face the possibility of losing their health benefits at the end of the month.  Stopgap measures, such as federally guaranteed COBRA coverage (an acronym for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act), are expensive – well over $600 per month.

Blomer said there was no alternative to the layoffs and shutdown.  With no fares coming in, there is no money for the payroll.  And although the Austrian-made rope is “perfectly fine,“ he said, it “cannot dock properly to allow proper boarding and deboarding.”

Blomer has been in the business for many years and has supervised much of the Roosevelt Island Tramway’s heavy maintenance work since the late 1980s.  In that period, the haul rope has been replaced about five times.  The cable, which runs through a bullwheel on Roosevelt Island, supplies the torque that moves the cabins back and forth over the East River.  It is about 1,000 meters long, weighs more than 38 tons, and consists of a polypropylene core wrapped with six steel strands.  Blomer said he knows what people are thinking.  “For the layperson, ’Look, how the hell can you be eight feet short?’” he said.

But it’s not as simple as cutting five feet of yarn, he said:  the procedure is complicated, there are “layers and stages to go through,“ and in the ski-lift and Tram business, mistakes do happen.  “It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last,“ he said.  “I’d do anything to have it back, but it’s not a reality, and the reality is that we have to find a way to cope with the situation.”

The solution that American Tramways arrived at – after considering “a dozen different scenarios,“ Blomer said – was to modify the way the haul cable is attached to the approximately meter-wide bollard, or drum, at the top of the cabin’s carriage assembly, in such a way as to recover 11 feet of cable.  “We’re saving one wrap around that,“ he said, “and increasing the plate clamps that hold the initial section of the rope to create the same equivalent holding force.“  The holding power and rope tensions would be altered to achieve “the same amount of safety” associated with a multiple wrap around the bollard.

Going from a 2.5 to a 1.5 wrap is essentially an engineering problem, one that must be reviewed by the Division of Health & Safety of the New York State Department of Labor.

Blomer said that the company’s Swiss-based engineers were making a submittal of technical information and drawings to the State agency.

In preparing for the submittal, Blomer said, the company’s personnel had already met with State engineers on site to brief them on the proposal and show them the components.  “They commented very favorably on the proposal,“ he said.  “They are willing to work with us on this thing as long as we could provide them with a good engineering package that answers the questions.”

The Division of Health & Safety’s engineering services unit is in charge of permit applications for a grab bag of events and devices: large tents, elevators, ski lifts and Tramways, window cleaning scaffolds, places of public assembly.  Its industry inspection bureau enforces safety regulations covering these activities, doing 9,000 carnival ride inspections a year, for example.  There’s even a Passenger Tramway Advisory Council, supported by the bureau, which advises the State labor commissioner.

Blomer’s hope for a mid-February reopening rests on the smooth completion of several approval steps, and the rigging and testing of the line.

A spokeswoman for the Labor Department said that the plans that American Tramways will submit to Albany must first be stamped, or approved, by a New York State licensed engineer.  Once that is done, the division’s engineers will take up the matter; she said they can generally pass on an application within about a week after they receive it.

The final green light has to come from the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, which owns the Tram.  John Melia, RIOC’s newly-appointed vice president for public information and community affairs, said RIOC would follow the Labor Department’s findings.  If the State rejects the modification, a new cable would have to be installed, in which case, Blomer said, it could be months before service resumes.

RIOC, which has been closely monitoring the situation, said that the plans were to be delivered from Europe to Watertown this week.  American Tramways is a unit of the Doppelmayr group of Austria.  The Tramway was built by the Swiss company Von Roll, whose aerial transportation business was absorbed by Doppelmayr in 1996.  Thus, the adjustments under review now are coming from the same company that installed the system 26 years ago.

Melia described the overall repair project, which cost $350,000, as the most extensive in the Tramway’s history.  Blomer said the carriages, which connect the cabins to the stationary track cables, were rebuilt.  Bearings, bushings, hanger arms, axle components, and the main hanger tubes were replaced, and the hydraulic track-rope brakes on both cars were rebuilt.  An engineer from Switzerland conducted a mechanical inspection, and the welds and electrical system were also inspected.

Island residents have complained about the timing of the work, and Blomer conceded that it’s preferable to do a shutdown in the summer.  American Tramways did not get the contract to operate the Tram until July, the cable had not been ordered at that time, and other problems pushed back the work, he said.

“The maintenance had to be done,” Blomer said, and it was his judgment that for safety reasons it couldn’t wait until July, 2002, for example.  Others familiar with the project said that a Canadian testing company had found numerous flaws in the 6-year-old haul cable, and Blomer himself told The WIRE last summer that it had exceeded its normal usefulness by a year or two.

“We want it to be safe and to get to the other end without a problem,” Blomer said, adding that it’s in the best interests of American Tramways employees, Island residents, and the company itself to get the Tram running again as soon as possible.