Interview: Architekt Mario Botta entwirft das Mineralbad & Spa Rigi ...

Stanserhorn –
destination for
innovation
There are hundreds of mountain
railways in Switzerland, including
several dozen just around Lake Lucerne.
“It’s good when not all are
alike”, says Jürg Balsiger, the director
of the cableway that leads
up to the scenic Stanserhorn,
“otherwise we only canabalise
each other”. That’s why the Stanserhorn-Bahn
will introduce the
world’s first open-top aerial cableway
in May 2012. A pioneering
project, that is entirely “Swiss
made”. The Stanserhorn’s old yellow
units were retired in October
2011, after 36 years of service.
By Remo Meister
After one year of construction and
seven previous years of planning,
the world’s first “cabriolet” cableway
will be launched in May 2012!
From the new base station at “Chälti”,
some 711 metres above sea level,
the ultra-modern cableway will
lift-off and then smoothly glide
over a distance of 2320 metres to
reach the summit station of the
Stanserhorn at an altitude of 1850
metres. The journey will require
only eight minutes and the new
double-deck cabins will feature
an expanded capacity with enough
space for up to 60 passengers. The
top deck alone will comfortably
accommodate 30 people, weather
permitting! In one hour a total of
465 passengers may be whisked to
the peak. Jürg Balsiger feels confident:
“We believe that the unique
attractiveness of the open-top cableway
will help boost our visitor
numbers by up to 25 percent.” Indeed
Balsiger is one of the “fathers”
of this remarkable technological
innovation and world novelty. He
is particularly pleased that the new
cableway is a milestone in Swiss
engineering. “Everything is Swiss
CABLEWAy TO THE STAnSERHORn
made – design, manufacture,
equipment, construction, supervision
– it’s all from Switzerland and
it makes us really proud!”
The original idea for an open-top
cableway to the Stanserhorn was
conceived in June 2004 on the
occasion of a candle-light dinner.
Balsiger and his colleague Reto
Canale, an ETH-engineer and
renowned cableway expert, had
made arrangements to have dinner
on the Stanserhorn together with
their daughters. Because the ladies
were really late, the two men waited
at a local pub in Stans and
shared their ideas about the possible
future of the cableway, whose
operating permit was set to expire
at the end of 2011. Balsiger reminisces:
“So we used the opportunity
to draw some simple sketches
on table mats.”
“We asked each other, what the
visitors might want and what
would give the Stanserhorn a
unique asset that could help secure
its market position in the future.”
Following their initial brainstorming
session, the two men went up
to the peak once their daughters
Bordmagazin 9