How DO You Get To the Top of the Arch?

It's a long way to the top and the cross section gets pretty small up there. How do people get to the Arch's observation deck?

There is a tram system, one in each leg. Eight claustrophobic little cabins. oval in cross section, are strung together. One person sits in the back, facing the door. Four others are squeezed along the sides, as you can see in the first picture. It is cramped in there. Everyone silently prays that it doesn't get stuck. (It happened once this year but that was the first time in a long while.)

The second picture shows the outer doors and one on the wheels that clamp over a rail. Obviously, the angle of curve changes as the tram goes up and down. The cars start to get slightly out of vertical pitch and then every once in a while kerchunk, the mechanism rights it again. Gets a squeal out of first timers.

I took the third picture on the way up, sitting in the back center seat. I am quite tall and you can see that my camera is above the level of the inner doors. Notice how close together the other passengers' knees are.

There is a good diagram of how the system works on this page. Interesting pages explaining the system are here and here. The last of these links tells a fascinating story of how the tram design was decided upon, after the Arch itself was finished. There are a couple of cute amateur videos shot from inside the cars on YouTube, like this one.

TOMORROW: The vastness of St. Louis from the skies. Well, we like to think so.