Why Building Ski Lifts Is Incredibly Hard

4:53 I actually wouldn't be that surprised if Disney had actually bought such a company. Imagineering has dabbled in transport systems many times, WDW has a lift system, and I wouldn't be that surprised if they had plans to develop them further for their own parks & resorts, or try and get into selling them as systems for others.

My dad always told me that the first stage of building a ski lift was to take a massive reel of cable the size of a house to the top of a mountain then get a couple of big strong blokes to push it off the edge. ....Then it rolls downhill clearing the trees & stuff and wherever the reel ends up is where you build the bottom station.

Currently works in a smaller ski resort. Most of our lifts are Doppelmayr (Including our two 4-seaters) but now I now i finally realized why the small button lift in the kids area is unoffically known as Poma. Fun fact: It's more common for small resorts to buy used lifts than brand new ones. Our "new" 4-seater is 20 years old, even though it was opened less than a month ago.

Hti group and dopelmayer group both have their headquaters in Austria. I think that is a relativ interesting fact that wasnt mentioned in the video.

This can definitely be said about most things. But speaking from personal experience, there’s a lot more going on working on ski resorts than people give credit for. I was on the snow building team but naturally got a peek into the operation as a whole.

Fun fact: Doppelmayr and Leitner are from Vorarlberg and South Tyrol (directly on the border to Austria). I find it funny that two companies, nearly both from Austria cornered the whole Skilift market. You don't see that in too many industries.

When you said Disney I totally believed you at first because of the Skyliner they installed at WDW around that time. Totally makes sense that Imagineering would've acquired a brand like that lol.

Me, a liftie watching this on my lunch break: Seems about right, but I’m disappointed that you didn’t mention how heavy the cables themselves are

This makes me think of the elevator industry. I've worked in the AEC industry for quite some time, and I can't recall ever seeing a project that had something other than an Otis or a Thyssenkrupp elevator, and I can't remember ever being on an elevator and noticing it was something different. Maybe an idea for a future video?

Last week I rode up with the head maintenance guy for my main ski resort and it's interesting cause he was telling me about how small resorts like them have to start getting the licenses and qualifications to self certify most things otherwise it would be so expensive that they would go out of business. Interesting guy and a interesting career

It would be cool to see a video like this about snowmakeing at ski reports, and the companies that make the snow guns! I think it would be a really interesting and something not to many people know about

4:26 weirdly america-centric choice of a factoid here given that the parent companies are also within a few hours of each other in europe

Its always weird to see the industry I work in talked about because its something 99% of people dont think about at all. The logistics for working on ski resorts is massive but most of it takes place in a way that the public never sees.

Awesome look into this industry. I worked for Poma back in the late 90s through mid 2000s. Absolutely the best job ever. We built all the new lifts at Killington and the gondola at Gore Mountain. Fly day was always the best with Carson and Ericsson heavy lift helicopters. Never a dull moment!

its both funny but also super weird for me, a european, to see how skiing in the us is. ski patrol on the slopes keeping people in check, passes that work sort of like a drivers license that can be revoked and things like that. while the lifts are mostly older models and many people dont even put the bar down. in comparison to europe, the skiing in the slopes is not controlled at all, yet the lifts are super modern and the bar goes down automatically at some as well. (note: most of my us knowledge is from videos on yt and only some from friends that have actually skied in the us)

As someone who worked at Disney world in the skyliner section. This video had made much more sense to me then any of my colleagues explained to me. Once again this video was very helpful for information use thank you

3:15 in the background you can see the label "Girak". Girak is a former Austrian ski-lift company and was famous in central and eastern europe. They produced fix gripped chairlifts as well as detachable chair- and gondola lifts. When Girak was absorbed by Garaventa in 1996, they started building surface lifts like t-bars, too. Finally, Doppelmayr took over Garaventa in 2002 which led to their breaktrough in the international ropeway construction industry.

Interesting to know why the old J-bar I used to ride was called a 'poma,' and why the towers that I go past on chair lifts all say 'riblet' on them.

Sidenote : the first try in urban transportation by Poma was the Poma2000 in Laon, France, built in the 80s. It was a 1.5km 3-stations long automated mini-metro meant to create a link between the high and low parts of the city. It worked for almost 30 years before being stopped due to its high cost of operation for a 25k inhabitants city. It was pushed by the government at the same time as the still-developped VAL and the iconic ARAMIS program which was shut down before reaching its end but offered an enormous legacy for automatisation of transit.

Let's address the elephant in the room; during WW1 Austria and Italy had this thing where they were fighting in the Alps and they built countless ropeways to transport military equipment, personnel, and just about everything else to the battlefield and back. After the war was over, the two countries had plenty of ropeway engineers, the necessary supply chains, and people needed to build them. So while Doppelmayr (an Austrian company) and Leitner (an Italian company) could just hire those people to design and build ski lifts, other companies had to pretty much invent everything from scratch, which is why they had so many accidents and why these two companies eventually took over the entire ropeway market.