Recent engineering reports have confirmed the safety of the Roosevelt Island Tramway, but Island officials have decided not to test the ultimate longevity of an aging system.  The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation’s proposed budget for 2003-04 seeks to jump-start a program of replacing major components of the Tram, including its cabins.

The budget calls for spending $500,000 to replace one of the cabins, and another $100,000 for carriage repair.  The carriage is the heavy hanger that connects the cabin to the track ropes spanning the East River.

Residents can thank their soon-to-be new neighbors for providing these repairs.  The money will come from a “restricted capital fund,” or endowment, that is being set up with payments from the first two buildings of Southtown. About 800 new residents, the families of workers from East Side medical institutions, are expected to move in this summer. From a budgetary standpoint, they represent a pool of new customers for the Tram and the source of capital to pay for the Island’s future needs.

Doppelmayr CTEC, an Austrian company with an office in Watertown, New York, operates the Tram under a contract with RIOC.  Larry Wollum, a Doppelmayr engineering representative based in Watertown, answered questions last week at the RIOC budget meeting.

“The average life span of an aerial tramway cabin and hanger is about 25 years, based on 300 days of operation, nine hours a day, which is about 67,000 hours of operation,“ he said. “Roosevelt Island has run 27 years of 360 days for 20 hours per day, which is about 190,000 hours, so it is about three times the life span of a tram cabin, based on operating cycle. There is no other installation in the world that has that many cycles for hours of operation.”

Wollum was guided in his presentation by Patrick Siconolfi, RIOC’s acting president.  Wollum said: “It doesn’t mean there is a need for immediate replacement, but the investigation of whether it should, should begin.”  He also pointed out that two of the track ropes – fixed wires that are the equivalent of railroad tracks – can no longer be repositioned to relieve the pressure on contact points, because they have gotten too short after years of adjustments.  Those wires will have to be replaced.

Board member David Kraut emphasized the unique nature of the Island’s system.  “No one does it anywhere else in the world, and so virtually every step we take is a new step,“ he said. “We’re making policy here for how to run a tramway as a commuter transportation system.”

In looking over the engineering reports, Kraut estimated that the cost of upgrading the system would be at least $5 million.  “With the exception of the towers themselves, virtually every part of the tram is probably going to need replacement over the next 10 years at a huge, for us, capitalization,” he said.

Board member Mark Ponton raised several basic questions. First, how can you tell when a carriage or cabin is getting worn out?

Wollum noted that the carriage, like an airplane, is fashioned from aluminum. “Aluminum is not quite so predictable as steel, and it needs a more thorough analysis,” he said.

“Steel always gives some warning signs that are fairly easy to determine with nondestructive testing, and  we’ve approached at least one company that does monitoring and analysis of aluminum parts and we have a quote from them for that work.”  The cabin itself is mostly aluminum, too, he said.

Ponton later questioned Siconolfi about the logic of replacing just one of the Tram cabins this year. “It seems to me they both start on the same day, they both run at the same time,“ he said.  “We’re either doing one too early or one too late, I think.  And I want to know which one I should ride on, among other things.”

Siconolfi said: “Both will be replaced earlier than necessary, is the answer to your question.“ He said that Doppelmayr and RIOC’s engineers from Kimley-Horn and Associates, a major consulting company, had determined that “starting five years from now’’ is when the “buckets [cabins] and the hangers” need to be replaced.

Siconolfi said that he and Vincent Kopicki, RIOC’s director of engineering and capital projects, and their consultants had discussed “how close to the edge do you want to play it.”

The decision, he said, was:  “Let’s do it sooner rather than later.  So if you do one this year and one next year we will still be early.”

Siconolfi said that a custom-built cabin would take eight months to build, and Wollum said that it would take about two weeks to install.

Ponton suggested that both cabins be replaced at about the same time, in order to minimize downtime, and added that if the work had to span two fiscal years, one cabin could be installed at the end of March 2004, and the other one in early April 2005. But Siconolfi said both cabins could be replaced in the same fiscal year, if the board wanted to do so.

Siconolfi also suggested that people should start thinking about possible “imaginative” uses for the old cabins.

Mary Beth Labate, who chairs the RIOC board, brought up the question of the $2 Tram fare, which will take effect in May.  Under the Island’s franchise agreement with the city, the Tram fare has to match the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s standard subway and bus fare, which is going up by 50 cents.  “Now might be an opportune time to push harder on the Metrocard,” Labate said, in other words, tying in the Tram to the rest of the MTA system.