Sixty-two seconds, if the car is happy

The ride from the ground lobby on 9th Avenue to the observation deck takes sixty-two seconds. That is the number on the spec sheet, and I have timed it with a stopwatch in my coveralls more mornings than I care to admit. The cars run at roughly five metres a second — about a thousand feet a minute in the old books we trained on — which feels brisk when your ears pop halfway up the concrete column.

What you are riding is a gearless traction elevator: steel hoist ropes running over a grooved drive sheave in the machine room near the top of the shaft, balanced by a heavy counterweight travelling on its own rails behind the wall. Before opening every morning, Dave and I used to run both cars top-to-bottom empty with the inspection switch on and just listen. A dry roller guide or a nickedgib liner talks to you long before a passenger ever notices a vibration.

Inside an observation elevator car looking along the hoistway — **Inside the hoistway run.** The 2019 drive and controller modernization smoothed out the deceleration ramp at the top landing. Before that, you could feel the relay bank step down as the car levelled.

Why the tower hums in a chinook

Calgary sits in the lee of the Rockies, and when a chinook wind comes over the pass at eighty kilometres an hour, the tower moves. It is designed to — concrete and rebar flex so they do not crack. At the top, the maximum design deflection in a heavy gale is around sixteen centimetres (six and a half inches). You will rarely feel the sway in your knees, but you will hear it in the shaft.

When the mast leans a fraction of a degree into a west wind, the long hoist ropes and travelling cables shift slightly in their natural catenary. The air moving through the hoistway vents catches the ropes, and the whole shaft hums like a bass string on a fence post. My first winter on the crew in 1997, I called my foreman at 6:00 a.m. convinced a main bearing was dry. He told me to look out the window at the chinook arch and go pour a coffee.

Maintenance Log · June 2005 · The Glass Floor

When the cantilevered glass ledge went in on the observation level in June 2005, we hauled the rigging gear and glazing cradles up on the freight cycle at two in the morning. Each panel is multi-layer laminated structural glass rated for a crowd load nobody could physically pack onto it. Even so, I refused to stand on it for a full week. A man who spends twenty-five years trusting steel channel and half-inch bolts does not step out over 9th Avenue on something he can see his boots through until he has watched a few thousand tourists test it first.

Looking straight down through the structural glass floor panels to the street below — **Straight down to 9th Avenue and Centre Street.** Tip from the crew: the glass is mopped before opening, so if you want a clear photograph without shoe scuffs, come in the first hour of the morning.

Practical tips for the ride

Two cars, one shaft: If one car is on service hold for restaurant freight between 11:00 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. or around 4:30 p.m., the lobby wait doubles immediately. Patience costs nothing.
Ear pressure: Sixty-two seconds is fast enough that toddlers sometimes fuss at the top landing. Have them swallow or take a sip of water as the car passes the halfway mark.
Afraid of the glass? The glass ledge is a bay on one side of the ring, not the whole floor. You can walk the entire 360-degree deck on solid concrete and never set a toe on glass.

Next: reading the prairie sky so you do not pay for a wall of haze.