Cable Car

A cable car is a vehicle that travels along a track or through the air while being pulled by a continuously moving cable. The idea sounds simple, but the story behind it is full of curious turns, heroic animals, and a few engineering firsts.

The best-known early cable-car system was built in San Francisco in 1873 by Andrew Smith Hallidie. Legend says Hallidie was inspired after seeing a loaded horse-drawn San Francisco streetcar slide backwards on a slippery, wet hill. The heavily weighted car dragged five of the horses to their deaths and the catastrophe prompted Andrew Hallidie and his partners to do something to prevent this from happening again.  Determined to spare the animals the ordeal, he devised a system where a moving underground cable hauled the cars uphill. The first successful line ran on Clay Street on August 2, 1873.

Hallidie initially didn't call them cable cars. Originally, one took a trip on ‘the endless wire rope way.’

The Clay Street Hill Railroad in its early years

Cable cars quickly became a sensation. By the late 19th century, cities from Chicago to Melbourne had adopted the technology. In fact, Chicago once had the largest cable-car network in the world, with more than 80 miles of track. It was eventually replaced by electric streetcars, which were cheaper to run.

In San Francisco, the cars are still operated in a remarkably old-fashioned way. The driver, called a “gripman,” manually grabs the underground cable with a lever known as the grip. When the grip clamps onto the cable, the car moves; when it releases, the car coasts or stops. The technique takes considerable skill, as the cable is constantly moving at about 9.5 miles per hour.

Not all cable cars run on streets. Some soar above the ground. The aerial cableway used for sightseeing or transport is often called a gondola. One of the most famous is the Roosevelt Island Tramway, which glides above the East River between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island.

Cable cars have also been used for surprisingly practical tasks. In mountainous regions they have carried everything from mail to livestock. During the early 20th century, some European cableways were even used to transport milk from remote alpine farms to valley dairies.

One curious feature of the San Francisco system is its “turntables.” Because the cars have no reverse gear, they must be physically spun around at the end of the line. Several of these wooden turntables are still pushed by hand by crews and willing passengers.

The Glacier Park Cableway on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (Yulong Snow Mountain) in Lijiang, Yunnan province, China, is widely regarded as the world's highest-altitude passenger cable car open to the public. It carries visitors from a base station at 3,356 metres up to a summit station at 4,506 metres above sea level, a vertical rise of 1,150 metres over a 2,980-metre-long cable run.

Despite their antique appearance, cable cars remain a serious engineering achievement. The underground cables in San Francisco run continuously through large wheels in a central powerhouse, forming loops that stretch for miles beneath the city streets. If one cable breaks, an entire line can grind to a halt.

The San Francisco cable cars were the first moving US National Historic Landmark, designated in 1964.  In 2014, New Orleans' St. Charles streetcar line was granted the same status by the Department of the Interior, becoming the second mobile National Historic Landmark.