Sandia Peak Tram will be closed for two months

The Sandia Tram shuttles visitors high in the air, where they can watch Albuquerque’s glistening lights or see cactuses and wildflowers grow small on the mountainside below as they ascend. Skiers and hikers use the tram to reach the top of Sandia Peak and access the Cibola National Forest or to come back down the mountain.

But for the bulk of this ski season, the Sandia Peak Aerial Tramway will be closed — from Jan. 9 through March.

The tram has been closed for upgrades before, such as in 2014 when the upper terminal was renovated with new heated floors and restrooms, or in 2016 on the tram’s 50th anniversary when the train cars were replaced for a second time, but this is the biggest upgrade in its years of operation. Along with the new drive and control system, the Sandia Tram’s lower terminal will be refreshed with deck repairs and painting.

Including construction, the upgrades will take an estimated $1.3 million, said Michael Donovan, general manager of the Sandia Peak Tramway.

Inside the same console operator room that has been running the tram since the tourist attraction was built in 1966, a shift supervisor checks a board of lights and buttons, knobs and a mechanically-controlled measure of the tram’s progress.

“Green means go. Red means stop,” shift supervisor Chris Miller said. “So, once I have all my clear signals from these cabins, let me know that these guys are ready to go, I’ll send my clear. I’ll do a reset.”

Miller can manually control the tram’s speed up the mountainside with a large dial.

“We adjust the voltage in the DC motor. That’s how we control the speed,” Donovan said.

The same motor and control system — regularly updated with new parts and maintenance — has pulled the tram up the mountain since the ‘60s.

The tramway will be closed to allow replacement of the old operator controls and motor with a new drive and control system. Replacement parts are becoming harder to find for the 1966 motor, and the new system will ensure that the tram can continue operating for many years. It will also give the tram operator more accurate tracking of the tram’s location.

Three redundant systems are always monitoring the tram, Donovan said.

“They talk to one another, and if any of them are ever out of phase or whatever, it will automatically stop the tram or slow it down to where it’ll only go at about two feet per second,” he said.

While the tram is closed for upgrades, Ten 3, the fine-dining restaurant at the top of the mountain, will also be closed. A spokesman for the restaurant said employees will be offered jobs at Ski Santa Fe, which has the same owner.

Scott Leigh, an adviser for Mountain Capital Partners, which operates Sandia Peak Ski Area, said the company is still working out an operations plan for the ski area and it’s not clear when the ski area will open.

Switching motors

Donovan chats with staff members about lumber purchases — 10 sheets of the three-quarter — as he walks into the back room that holds the tram’s backup motor. The regular motor is so noisy that it is located outside.

When the tram was constructed in 1966, AC motors didn’t have the ability to have precise speed control, so a DC motor was used to run the tram, Donovan said.

The staff took line power, which provides an alternating current, and used that to drive a direct current generator, which sends power to the direct current motor.

The new motor will be an AC motor, which can use line power, eliminating the need for a generator to convert the power. In the 1960s, there weren’t AC motors that could offer variable speed. AC motors could be on or off, or at set speeds.

Sandia Tram to close early in 2024

“With an AC motor, you have less ability to control speeds,” Donovan said. “That’s why you need to use a fancy computer, or a PLC computer is what we call it, that has a variable frequency drive that will deal with the alternating current and allow us to slow down and control the traffic.”

The tram will be upgraded with a computer-controlled digital system, replacing the electromechanical system.

The new motor will be more energy-efficient, have diagnostic tools to find problems more quickly and have several backup systems to determine the tram’s location on the line.

Sandia Tramway is working with Swiss company Sisag to retrofit the new system with the tramway so that the entire tram configuration does not have to be replaced.

“Tramways are all over Europe,” Donovan said. “Their install base is significantly larger than here in North America, and so this company Sisag works with companies like Sandia Peak Tram to develop retrofit systems to existing systems. Otherwise, potentially, you might have to rebuild the whole tram.”

15 photos show the Sandia Tram in ABQ through the years