Cable railway

For cable-hauled passenger mass transit railways, detachable from cable, see Cable car (railway). For steeply-graded passenger railways with cars fixed to the rope, see Funicular. For links between canals, see Canal inclined plane.
Trwnc incline at the Vivian Quarry[1] showing two permanently attached platform wagons. Slate trucks were pushed onto the horizontal tops of these wagons to travel on the incline.

A cable railway is a railway that uses a cable, rope or chain to haul trains. It is a specific type of cable transportation.

The most common use for a cable railway is to move vehicles on a steeply graded line that is too steep for conventional locomotives to operate on – this form of cable railway is often called an incline or inclined plane, or, in New Zealand, a jigline,[2] or jig line.[3] One common form of incline is the funicular – an isolated passenger railway where the cars are permanently attached to the cable.[4] In other forms, the cars attach and detach to the cable at the ends of the cable railway. Some cable railways are not steeply graded - these are often used in quarries to move large numbers of wagons between the quarry to the processing plant.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Carrington was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ "Lower Mangahao Dam site - view up jigline". collections.tepapa.govt.nz. 1920–1921. Retrieved 2023-11-02.
  3. ^ "The jig line. Nelson Evening Mail". paperspast.natlib.govt.nz. 26 August 1938. Retrieved 2023-11-02.
  4. ^ Walter Hefti: Schienenseilbahnen in aller Welt. Schiefe Seilebenen, Standseilbahnen, Kabelbahnen. Birkhäuser, Basel 1975, ISBN 3-7643-0726-9 (in German)