Seems that the DA is in http://www.majorprojects.planning.nsw.gov.au/index.pl?action=view_job&job_id=10115
So the venerable Mt P double will be demolished after its 60th year of operation. Still, that's a very impressive lifespan for Australia's oldest surviving chairlift.
Some of the details taken from an Austalian ski lift related website: Perisher has lodged a planning application to replace the Mt Perisher Double (1961) and Triple (1979) chairlifts with a 6-pack. The new detachable Doppelmayr chairlift will be 1254 metres long with a vertical rise of 309 metres. The base station will be at 1733 metres, top station 2042 metres and the top of Eyre T-bar will be moved 11 metres downhill to make room for it. It will run at 4,5 metres a second with an interval between chairs of 7.2 seconds, giving a trip time of 5 min 31 seconds. Together with associated works the price is estimated at $20 million. The new lift will probably open in 2021 after the Mt P double has completed its 60th year of service.
Looks like 2041.69 ASL top station. 1731.69 at bottom. 310 high-speed detactable V/M's for @Normo to play with. Will he abandon Eyre and International?
Shame it's a Doppelmayr though. Recent Dopp detachable chairs mostly run at 4.5 metres a second, while new Leitner-Poma chairs like the recent Eagle chair at Falls Creek run at 5.1 m/s. That would have given us an extra half minute to ski instead of sitting on a chairlift... not that I'm complaining, this new lift is still fabulous news!
The top station will be quite visible from Kosi, possibly a source of objection from a Planning Approval perspective. Not that I understand the DA process in NSW. Thoughts @Telemark Phat ?
I've gotta introduce the toddler to Christmas baking tonight, so no time for a good look, I've not done much with visual assessment. Have a look at the SEE and the visual assessment maps to check out the impact. You can hide a lot with the right colour choices and the project has the POM to back it up. The resort area is to be managed with recreation as well as conservation in mind.
The places where it will be seen from are shown on the map in this pdf at this link. Yep, that includes Kosciusko, but at that distance you'd probably need a high powered telescope to see anything more than a small dot on the horizon.
I can see the cain/oblisk thingy on Kosi from the top of Mt P, so it’ll be no trouble to see a two storey shed from the other way.
Well it depends if you know where to look. There is a demographic that seems to be desperate to protest about everything. But I doubt a small blip camouflaged with snowgum green paint would offend the sensibilities of even 1% of the hordes who take the chairlift from Thredbo up to Kosi.
Actually not. Similar vertical ascent speed to international T-bar. International 4m 40secs, 257m, so 0.92m/s, new 6 pack 5m 31s for 310m so 0.94m/s Obviously much quicker than the current chairs, which are glacially slow As predicted it is a side unload at the top, launching people out towards Eyre. What I didn't know about is them lowering the unload of Eyre by a significant chunk That will make it much harder to get out wide from Eyre. On a powder day if you go out wide, you will then have to do the cat track back to the chair if you want to head wide or out of bounds on the next run. On the plus side, it will make it much easier to lap sun valley, burnum burnum, sidewinder etc on powder days Other things of note, definitely a detachable. Large station at the top, with covered bullwheel and unload, which should make it more windproof. Single cable. Can't come soon enough EDIT : reading the application more closely, Eyre Bullwheel relocated 11m down the hill, which probably means 11m as you walk down the hill, so probably only lose 3m vertical. Also, they may be able to move the unload closer to the bullwheel so may not be so bad? Also, there seems to be a lot of Guthega skink habitat up there
T-bars and fixed grip chairlifts generally run at around 2.2 metres a second. Detachable chairs and Poma-lifts run between 4 and 5.2 m/s. So a person riding the new 6-pack will be going at twice the speed they would be on the old chairlifts or Eyre T-bar. The country's only T-bar with a bend generally runs a little slower so people can negotiate the corner with less trouble. The lift timings for the new lift were taken from the bottom right corner of this pdf, but I suspect someone on the team that calculated the speed isn't terribly good at maths.
There is theory ... and there is practice. A bunch of people will quickly work out where the bang for bucks hangs out. As for me, I’m kind of glad that there are some chair options popping up that MIGHT keep up with the T-bars, given my advancing years and diminishing stamina!
Perisher doesn't have that many detachable chairlifts on "interesting" slopes, detachables are mostly confined to green and light blue runs. But you will find that the new Mt P chair will run at twice the speed of the old Mt P chairs. Of course, it is possible to run lifts too fast. Many years ago in old Mexico, a bunch of bright sparks at Buller decided to run their Summit Access / Howqua Poma at 6.5 metres a second, or three times the speed of a T-bar. That made it the fastest ski lift ever in Australia (and possibly the world). But the regular carnage meant that after running at (literally) breakneck speeds for three years, they slowed it down to 4.0 m/s a second for the rest of its life. But I still fret at the slooow speed of T-bars and I wish Australian resorts had kept some of the high speed Pomas on dark blue and black runs.
Amazingly there actually is There isn't much elsewhere. Might explain why they are critically endangered?
I'm not doubting the importance and worthiness of that skink, they're nice critters and shouldn't be disturbed more than absolutely necessary. Just today the Kiwis cancelled a chairlift due to rare lizards. Cardrona cancels Pringles Chairlift installation due to alpine lizards- December 23, 2019 But if you have the will and an ability to spin, then you can make anything sound rare if it suits your agenda. It comes down to if you define things by Genus, species, sub-species or race. (I think there is a new word for race, but I don't recall what it is.) Thus you can have 100 almost identical creatures, but if you can isolate one of them by a minor and unimportant characteristic, you can claim that it is a rare animal. One example is the fairly common Yellow-tufted honeyeater, but a subdivision of a sub species of that bird has been given the name 'helmeted honeyeater' and all sorts of noise is being made about them being seriously endangered when they are very nearly indistinguishable from other subspecies and races of the moderately common Yellow tufted honeyeater and are not really a different kind of bird at all. But I will be the first to lie in front of a bulldozer if it threatens a genuinely rare and important genus or species.
and almost certainly vail will fit chairs without footrests, because they are lighter and cheaper That is actually a problem for me. Chairs without footrests really aggravate my ankle problems. Hopefully this one will be short enough hang time to be ok. I can manage leichardt and V8 as they are short, but interceptor or current Mt P chairs are really painful for me
I reckon the resorts should fund a comprehensive, park wide, survey of all critters so the actually know what is endangered and what is not. At the moment they are finding critters in resorts because that is the only place that anyone is having a really good look.
That is most certainly not the case, most work is done away from Park boundaries. The resorts fund an officer to monitor the resort's impacts on the park as a requirement of the POM. Critters are found in the resort's because the resort's are in the critters habitat. There needs more funding though. With the retirement of Dr Ken Green there is no longer an ecologist for KNP.
I didn't know you were both an ornithologist and a taxonomist! Also Bogong why do you always talk about your australian chair lift website like its not yours? That humble brag makes you look like a latte sipping helmeted honeyeater champion.
Well Tyrol T-bar at Buller had 360 metres of vertical before it was shortened at the top. (Federation has 332 m of vertical but I suspect the top of it is slightly higher than Tyrol.) If you skied from the top of Grimus chair, across the top of Boggy Creek and down Tyrol you'd be getting close to 500~ish metres of vertical. Of course I'm not suggesting that Buller of all places has the highest lifted vertical in the country, (Thredbo's Kosi Exp has 560 metres), rather I'm pointing out that Thredbo doesn't have the monopoly on large verticals that some people claim it has. Other resorts have decent slopes too.
Well firstly I don't like to big note myself and I'd be appalled if I came across as some sort of pompous "expert". Secondly I don't want people to think I'm obsessed with lifts, they're just one of my lesser interests. That web page began as a small project 12 years ago because I was frustrated that books and magazines got things wrong, so I thought I'd put the record straight and it's just slowly grown over the years. The third reason I don't advertise that it's mine is that people will probably give more honest and open thoughts and opinions on this forum if they don't know that I'm responsible for the lifts web page. Sometimes those posts reveal new information or challenge my assumptions, which gives me a basis to go off and check things or re-evaluate my thoughts. So, while I don't try and hide that the ski lift list is my creation, I don't want to advertise that I'm responsible for it either. The only reason I eventually put my real name on it was because some other people were ripping off big chunks of my work and claiming it as their own, so I had to assert my copyright.