Up, up and away for Queenstown's new gondolas

A new era for Queenstown’s most popular tourist attraction will dawn tomorrow morning, when Skyline’s new gondola starts taking passengers up and down Bob’s Peak.

Thirty-six 10-seaters replace the four-seaters which last plied the route on April 22 after 36 years’ service.

They are the centrepiece of a $250 million redevelopment that has included, to date, 10 new towers, a new cableway and new bottom and top gondola terminals, not to mention tree-felling on the hillside.

Skyline’s construction project manager Paul Embleton-Muir said he was delighted, due to the "massive efforts" of the construction crew, which had been latterly working around the clock, they were reopening a day ahead of schedule, "which is somewhat unprecedented at the moment".

"We’ve got [Doppelmayr staff] over from Austria commissioning it, we’ve got people in Austria wired in, just checking it all."

Testing included running the cableway with wheelie bins filled with water in the cabins, and an evacuation exercise earlier this week.

Mr Embleton-Muir said people would be amazed at how smooth the cabins were to ride — "it’s like going from a clapped-out Toyota to a nice Mercedes, it’s really something".

Capacity was increasing from 1000 people an hour to 3000 in both directions.

There would be a temporary ticketing facility until a new one was ready by the end of October.

Work would now start on a new top restaurant-terminal building, which would be built over two stages, while a 400-space carpark, by the bottom terminal, would be complete by the end of next March.