Cable railway
[3] One common form of incline is the funicular – an isolated passenger railway where the cars are permanently attached to the cable.
The oldest extant cable railway is probably the Reisszug, a private line providing goods access to Hohensalzburg Fortress at Salzburg in Austria.
The line originally used wooden rails and a hemp haulage rope and was operated by human or animal power.
[5][6] In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, several railways used cable haulage in preference to locomotives, especially over steep inclines.
Today it is the world's only preserved operational 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge cable railway system.
[8] A Pit fishbelly gravitational railway operated between 1831 and 1846 to service the Australian Agricultural Company coal mine.
The majority of inclines were used in industrial settings, predominantly in quarries and mines, or to ship bulk goods over a barrier ridgeline as the Allegheny Portage Railroad and the Ashley Planes feeder railway shipped coal from the Pennsylvania Canal/Susquehanna basin via Mountain Top to the Lehigh Canal in the Delaware River Basin.
The Ashley Planes were used to transship heavy cargo over the Lehigh-Susquehanna drainage divide for over a hundred years and became uneconomic only when average locomotive traction engines became heavy and powerful enough that could haul long consists at speed past such obstructions yard to yard faster, even if the more roundabout route added mileage.
Level tracks are arranged above and below the gradient to allow wagons to be moved onto the incline either singly or in short rakes of two or more.
These ranged from simple lumps of rock wedged behind the wagon's wheels to permanently installed chocks that were mechanically synchronized with the drum braking system.
At Maenofferen Quarry a system was installed that raised a short section of the rail at the head of the incline to prevent runaways.
In order to accommodate intermediate levels, turnouts were used to allow wagons to leave and join the cable railway part way along its length.
One of the major inclines at Dinorwic had four parallel tracks, two worked by the ballast method and two as conventional gravity balance.
A stationary engine drives the winding drum that hauls the wagons to the top of the inclined plane and may provide braking for descending loads.
A single cable is attached to both trains, wound round a winding drum at the top of the incline to provide braking.
[13] This form of incline has the advantages of a gravity balance system with the added ability to haul loads uphill.
With the cable or chain attached to the wagons to be drawn, but the drive to the drum disengaged, the locomotive climbs the slope under its own power.
It is similarly employed for recovery operations where derailed rolling stock must be hauled back to the permanent track.
