Engineers build biggest ‘reversible aerial tramway’

2016 Martial Stark

Tourists who visit a popular destination in northern Vietnam can now ride what Swiss and Austrian engineers call the world’s biggest reversible aerial tramway with the tallest ropeway towers ever built.

The taller of the two concrete towers erected is nearly 190 metres high and each of the tramway’s two cabins can hold 230 passengers – the biggest ever made, said the Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group, based in Austria and Switzerland. The tramway runs 2,165 metres in length and was built around Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with stunning cliff islands and emerald waters, 

The group’s online statement boasts that “pretty much everything on this installation … can be described as XXL”. The outsized tramway, officially called the “230-ATW Ha Long Queen Cable Car” and financed by the Sun Group, took a little more than a year and a half to build. It officially opened on the June 25. 

Some seven million visitors a year flock to the “bay of the descending dragon”, said the engineering group. The tramway runs between a lower terminal in the Bai Chay district of Ha Long City up to the top of Ba Deo Hill, which also has an amusement park with a popular observation wheel.