Sainte Foy Tarentaise : 04 June 2020
There’s a long running rumour that the dismantled lift will be sold to some unsuspecting ski station in a remote part of mountainous Bulgaria.
Before exploring this hypothesis, let’s look at the cable in question. The smaller of the two cables in the lead picture is our cable from the Arpettaz chairlift in Sainte Foy. The larger one is from the funicular in Les Arcs.
This is an end shot of the cable showing its structure, which is designed to provide the maximum level of strength and flexibility for its size.
My schoolboy maths tells me that when you double the diameter of a circle, you quadruple the surface area, but we will need an engineer to tell us how this affects the strength of the cable.
Now that we know what it looks like close up, here’s a clue to its future usage . . .
. . . and this is what he was making.
So unless that remote Bulgarian ski resort has an inventive way of glueing these back together again, they seem doomed for the ‘poubelle’, dustbin, which is where the man in the blue raincoat helpfully advised me they would end up.
The pylons however, are a different story.
They are being dismantled and carted off without being chopped into little pieces.
They are being stored in a depot in Bourg Saint Maurice. The workman I spoke to, said that they would be coming back to Sainte Foy in a couple of years time to be used in the construction of the next lift.
Then it started to rain again, so we all headed down the hill.
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