Denis Creissels, smell like lift spirit
By Mathieu ROS – PHOTOS : Nicolas JOLY
First published in Ski Magazine #396, december 2009
Mathieu Ros Medina is a passionate skier, snowboarder and mountain enthusiast with more than 15 years of experience as a journalist in these fields.
Denis Creissels began his career by answering a classified ad for the Pic du Midi in Chamonix. The cable car “was looking for a polytechnician engineer to have good relations with the control services – headed by a polytechnician” says this proud student of French elite engineer school. Under the leadership of Dino Lora Totino, designer of this extraordinary cable car, Denis Creissels went on to create the first engineering consultancy firm for cable transport. He invented the DMC (double mono cable) gondola and designed mythical machines such as the Bastille gondola in Grenoble, the late telescopic cableway in Marseille, and the famous “téléphérique”, the pulsating gondola in La Grave.
Mathieu Ros :
Did you originally have a passion for the mountains?
Denis Creissels :
My parents had a chalet in Megève, I used to ski there, but I am originally from the Aveyron region [quite rural countryside in central southern France] where there is a village called Creissels.
In fact nothing predisposed me to this trajectory. You can imagine, having a job in Chamonix, on the Aiguille du Midi, there was nothing better, at least for me. And then I had an extraordinary boss, Count Dino Lora Totino, who had imagined this cable car for the peak. He was quite a character, he had started the drilling of the Mont Blanc tunnel at his own expense, he had done all the triangulation… He was the only boss I ever had but he was worth it!
MR :
You created quite a few “special” installations that have become your trademark…
DC :
At the time they were called “Creisselleries”. There are them everywhere, tele-metro, tele-bus in La Plagne, tele-village in Valmorel, tele-Riou in Auron… When you go to Les Menuires, I made these yoghurts baskets painted in dark green which are still running, they are over 40 years old and still work very well.
I consider myself as an architect in cable transport. I do mechanics, I take what fits in the boxes to make installations that correspond to a particular demand. That’s why I signed all these horizontal and pedestrian lifts in ski resorts, because they were special things. It was with these “creisselleries” that I specialized.
The big manufacturers such as the Doppelmayr group or Poma have design offices, but in the end they registered fewer patents than I did as an independent.
MR :
And then there was the Bastille in Grenoble…
DC:
This lift has become the emblem of Grenoble, from coffee cups to postcards. I modified this lift in 1976, before that it was a back and forth, and the problem is that when I was at the Aiguille du Midi, the question most often asked was not “is the weather nice up there” but “how long will it take to get back?” People are in a hurry and they don’t like to feel trapped. In addition to that, in these 24-person cabins, the stronger people would take the best scenic spots and those in the middle couldn’t see anything. So I made a transformation to combat all that. First of all, continuous transport so that people can get off whenever they want, secondly, not too fast an ascent and descent so that it’s part of the attraction, and thirdly, very glassy cabins, some people are even afraid of that.
The day of the inauguration, in 1976, there was a breakdown, I was “lost at La Grave” as the newspaper wrote. When I arrived, they had started to evacuate people by helicopter, so that everyone knew in half a day that there was a cable car in Grenoble. If we look at the figures given by the Bastille, it was around 246,000 people per year. After the transformation, we had 347,000 visitors, a 40% increase.
That’s what I’m proud of. These figures prove that we have considerably improved the attraction and the city of Grenoble. When I think that afterwards the municipality demolished the small chairlift which was up there, a prototype of the late Pomagalski… I had proposed a great project, with an alpine garden, a ski museum and a ski lift museum. And with this small chairlift that existed, and the artificial snow that had appeared, we could have made, as in Vancouver, a few small slopes accessible to city dwellers by public transport.
MR:
What have been your proudest achievements over the decades in the lift business?
DC:
One of my greatest prides is that I managed to design and have manufactured a gondola that can withstand the wind. Because that’s the big problem with mountain cable cars: the wind. So I managed to solve this, with a patent dating from 1984. Instead of having a load-bearing cable and a small hauling cable, I took the same section of large cables and put it upright, away from the other, and I hooked lower vehicles onto it, which are better able to withstand the wind. There is one in Verbier, they are very happy with it, they made it work with ski patrollers one day under 140 km/h winds. For the public, it stops at 30m/s winds, or 108km/h, which is not so bad. The Jandry in Les 2 Alpes was the beginning of this two-cable system, the DMC (Double Mono Cable), but they are too close together, 70 cm from each other.
Nowadays, they are 3.40 metres apart, like the Peclet funitel in Val Thorens, which allows the cabin to be placed practically between
MR :
And what about your failures?
DC :
I’m going to talk about the double contour detachable chairlift (TSD in French, for Telesiège Débrayable). The problem, when you want to increase the flow, is that you will have seats that are faster and faster, and there is no more room to get people up smoothly. We saw that they were selling 6-seater TSDs with could embark 3,600 skiers per hour. It stopped all the time, there was always someone who had lost a glove, etc.
So we came up with a system where once the seats arrive at the station, half of them take a contour, and the other half a wider track. There are only a few of them, one in Val Thorens, two in Les Menuires, and one in Colorado, in Breckenridge. It’s a commercial failure, in fact we’ve made a mistake by offering a chairlift with a capacity of 5,000 skiers per hour. This kind of speed would be interesting in the US, where the Forest Service constrains resorts much more than in Europe and doesn’t let them build too many lifts. But at 5,000 skiers/hour, you have to have the runs to match!
In the end, we realized that it wasn’t the speed that we should have emphasized, the best thing about this double contour TSD is that on the outer contour the seats come in half as fast. It’s perfect for beginners and children, that’s what we should have put forward.
I don’t understand why we don’t see more of this type of machine. Just the other day I was at the opening of an chairlift with a carpet. A carpet! So the children go backwards, the beginners, it’s even worse… OK, it’s a bit more expensive to make a double contour, but you have to know what you want to achieve!
MR :
What do you see as the facilities of tomorrow, everything has already been invented?
DC :
In the ski resorts, the problem has been solved perfectly in my opinion: the solution is the detachable chairlift. It was a tricky thing that is now perfectly mastered by all manufacturers. These installations fit perfectly with the practice of skiing: they are 1,200-1,500m long, with a 400-500m vertical, and they can be embarked with excellent comfort and safety. And it works, at prices barely more expensive than a fixed-grip chairlift.
It’s suitable for skiing because you seldom need more vertical. 400-500 meters is the vertical that a good skier can do before stopping to breathe, and it allows you to have the same type of snow from top to bottom. In cable transport, I don’t know what could be simpler and more suitable.
And then, from there, we can do whatever we want, the double contour for more comfort, folding seats, a mixture of cabins and seats… On top of that, it’s continuous transport.
The jumbo cable cars are nonsense, you’d think you were on the metro in Paris. In these big things, you unload 150 or 200 people at the same time to put on their skis at the top! No, there’s nothing like continuous transport, with regularly equipped machines that unload people with normal traffic. Discontinuous transport, wherever you are, is not functional. For beginners, there is the so-called magic carpet (they made a 400-metre-long one in a German station). Then there are the detachable chairlifts. And then if you have problems, there’s the DMC for the wind, the detachable cable car (or “3S”) if you have huge spans to go over, like the Peak to Peak in Whistler. Typically, between Les Arcs and La Plagne, it would have been better with a 3S, but they went for this very marketable 200-seat cabins.
MR :
La Grave cable car is over 50 years old, it’s at the end of its life?
DC :
Are you joking!?! Technically and mechanically it’s very simple. One day an insurer told me “you know, your pylons are already thirty years old, we’re willing to go to fifty years but not much more.”. I told him to go and tell that to the Eiffel Tower! It’s the same with concrete: what about dams? No, this is a facility that is in much better condition than in the 1990s. Don’t worry about the solidity.
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