Golden Eagle Express Gondola Crash – Kicking Horse, BC

[Sym P. le]

The only reason this incident didn't have a more drastic outcome is because the failure occurred just coming out of the lift station. The lift runs 3.4 km gaining 4,133 ft of elevation. It's a 12 minute ride.

 

[Tomfh]

Fatigue at the bend presumably. Looks like a bit of a kink associated with the bending operation too, which wouldn't help.

 

[SWComposites]

Right at the site of max tensile stress. Hmmm……

 

[IRstuff]

great, I'm just about to go skiing

 

[epoxybot]

Maybe they should design these to have an internal wire cable restraint, as a redundancy.

 

[XR250]

Maybe they should design these to have an internal wire cable restraint, as a redundancy.

Maybe they thought that coax cable would take care of it?

 

[LittleInch]

These are very common tube supports to gondola type cars. It would be interesting to see how many have failed in service or failed an inspection due to cracking.

So if this is a very rare occurrence, you can see why they haven't added any additional cables.

It does look a bit like they have hot bent tubes to get those sort of radii and the danger is always that they cool it too fast or heat it too much.

I hope they weren't cold bent.

 

[IRstuff]

OK, I'm spending waay too much time staring at hangers for each lift chair I get on and the other riders are looking at me weird. I snapped the picture below yesterday

I think the biggest issue with an internal failsafe is that it would need to be welded or otherwise mechanically attached, which adds failure points to the main support.

 

[Tomfh]

If you wanted a safety chain why not external to the main arm?

I agree it’s not really necessary. Just make the arms stronger if fatigue is at all a risk.

 

[IRstuff]

Externality doesn't alleviate the potential connection failure points or their impact on the strength of the hanger arm itself, and given that the chain, or restraint, would never actually be loaded until something bad happens, it would suffer the same lack of attention to maintenance as the rest of the hanger. That's not a particularly comforting arrangement.

Furthermore, you can't even be sure that someone has installed the correct chain grade and size.