Fifty-eight seconds, if the car is behaving

People ask me what the ride feels like. It feels like an office building lift that has been to the gym. Fifty-eight seconds from the ground lobby to the main deck, and most of that you spend watching the city drop away through the glass front of the car. The cars run on a cable system with a counterweight, the same principle as the lift in your apartment building, only the rope is thicker than your wrist and the machine room sits near the top of a concrete shaft instead of on a roof.

There are three public cars. Two have the glass front facing the harbour; one is mostly solid and people grumble about it. That solid one is not a punishment. It is the car that gets used when the wind is up, because a car with a glass wall is heavier on one side and the guide rails take the load differently. On a gusty day you will hear the difference before you feel it — a low knock from the rail, then a small correction.

Why one car is always the slow one

There is no "slow car". There is a car that has been asked to do something else. When the restaurant floor is turning over between sittings, one lift gets tied up with service traffic — linens, trolleys, staff — and the dispatcher holds it out of the public queue. The two that remain take everybody, so the wait looks uneven. If you see one set of doors closed with nobody in the car, that is usually why.

Storms, sway and the brake test

The tower moves in wind. Not much — the top sways in a way you can measure but not see — and the lifts are built for it. What you feel in the car on a windy day is the guide shoes correcting, a small side-to-side shuffle near the top. It is normal. I have ridden that car through storms that closed the deck and never once doubted the brake.

The brake test is the thing that keeps a mechanic humble. Every car gets tested with a load, and the test is loud: the brake drops, the car stops, the rope takes a bounce you can hear two floors away. If you are on the deck and hear a heavy thud from the shaft, that is probably a test, not an emergency. We did them early in the morning for exactly that reason.

One more thing, because it comes up: the ride down is faster than the ride up in your head, not on the clock. Same fifty-eight seconds. It just feels shorter because you are not waiting for the doors to open on something new.

If you want the iron in more detail, the deck page covers what the lifts are lifting, and how tickets work covers timed entry.