When you can’t wait for the fun to start, you want to get to where you’re going—fast. With guest satisfaction in mind, Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park will soon install a speedy new tram that transports visitors to America’s only mountaintop theme park faster than ever before.
It won’t be long before Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park welcomes guests aboard a state-of-the-art new tramway slated for installation later this year. The new tram will double the speed and triple the capacity of the current Iron Mountain Tramway, the main transport system that takes visitors via gondola cars from the floor of the Roaring Fork Valley to the top of Iron Mountain, an elevation gain of 1,300 feet.
The new tramway will be comprised of 44 detachable, six-passenger cabins with a capacity to convey up to 1,000 people per hour. For comparison, the current tram, with 18 cabins, transports 300 visitors per hour. The new tram will cut the travel time in half, from 12-15 minutes to approximately seven minutes, effectively eliminating customer wait times. In addition to its speed, the new tram will be more reliable. The detachable tram is designed to equally distribute the weight of the cabins across all the towers, which will allow it to sustain higher winds without impacting operations. “This system will help us enhance our guests’ experience by reducing wait times and reducing the frequency of weather-related tram closures,” Nancy Heard, general manager of Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park, explained. “It will be more stable in high-wind conditions and will eliminate 80 percent of the shutdowns caused by wind and lightning.”
The reason the new tram will be less susceptible to weather-related closures is twofold. First, operators will have the ability to clear people off the tram in seven minutes rather than 15. Second, the new tram will have lightning arrestors that will dissipate the electricity and minimize the potential damage to the tram. This will allow operators to wait to see if a storm develops before deciding to shut down the tram. Currently, the tram closes as a precaution even though in some cases storms may not materialize. The more resilient new tram will reduce the need to run busses and Adventure Vehicles up and down the mountain during inclement weather.
For guests attending Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park events such as Music on the Mountain, Friday Afternoon Club, Octoberfest or Winter on the Mountain, the high capacity and more dependable tram will be an asset to event attendees who want to depart at the end of a show, a time when there is a high demand to return to the base.
As for the timeline, Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park will be open as usual during the peak season from spring through Oct. 28, 2018. During the construction of the new tramway, from mid-November through mid-March, 2019, the park will be temporarily closed.
After the new tram is installed, it’s full-speed ahead for fun at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park!
