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Sunday 13 October 2013

Cable Car

Andrew Smith Hallidie of San Francisco, California developed the cable car system when he saw 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.

Hallidie's Clay Street Hill Railroad, the first successful cable hauled street railway, first operated in San Francisco in August 1873.

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

The San Francisco Municipal Railway, operator of the city's famed cable car system opened its first line in 1912.

The San Francisco cable cars are the only mobile national monuments in the United States .

The world's longest operable cableway is the Forsby-Köping limestone cableway in Sweden at 26 miles.

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