Sky Ride - Design

Design

The Sky Ride consisted of two towers, each 628 feet (191 m) high, spaced 1,850 feet (560 m) apart. Each tower had 4 elevators with a 30 person capacity. Fair goers could take a trip across from one tower to the other at the 200-foot (61 m) level, or take the elevator farther up to the observation decks at the top of the tower. There were two decks per tower and Bausch and Lomb supplied the 12 coin-operated telescopes on the tower observation decks. If they chose to take a trip across, they rode in one of 12 double-decked "rocket cars" carried across from one tower to the other. Each car emitted steam intended to resemble a "tail" or rocket exhaust, as it traveled across the wires. At night, lights were focused on the cars as they traveled between the towers, and lights were also attached to the bottom of the elevators.

The transporter bridge, a very rare type of bridge, is more common in Europe. In the United States, only two transporter bridges were ever built: the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, Minnesota in 1905, and the Sky Ride. Due to capacity constraints, the Duluth bridge was converted from a transporter bridge to a more conventional vertical lift bridge with a raisable through truss span in 1930. Thus, the count of transporter bridges existing at a given time in the US never exceeded 1, and after November 1934, stands at zero again.