Was browsing the Seattle city archives & found this nifty lift.
Here’s the bottom.
& here’s the top.
Might not replace a helix, but could solve some steep g
There used to be several similar sidehill elevators in Japan, including one that had several intermediate ‘stations.’ One of the things I would lke to do, but won’t have space for, is a sidehill elevator short-circuiting a stairstep switchback on my more ambitious narrow-gauge line.
It’s an interesting idea, but I suspect that actually operating over it would be a major PITA - and not only because of the possibility of flipping a loaded car if it hit bottom too hard.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
[:)]
A bit off topic, but some of them actually ride on rails.
If you do a Google search on “Belgium ship lift,” you will find references to a lot of barge elevators.
When we were living in Belgium, we visited this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronquières_inclined_plane
[:)] [:)]
Hi from Belgium,
Nice to see some post about my country.
Yes I beleive we are the champions of ship lift in Belgium.
The two following ones are unique in the world.
We have two big ones, one whit an elevator system at “Strepy” near the SHAPE camp. This elevator had cost more than 300 millions of euros and today only one side is working. It was build during the 80’s and 90’s.
A second one “Plan incline de Ronquières” which was built in the 50/60’s… In this system the ship are going in something like a bassin which roll on track along a incline way. The travel take 15 minutes to do and we are able to move commercial ship of 1500 tons in the small bassin.
At the link cited before and on google you can find a lot of informations about them
We have a third one which was built in the early 1900’s and it is really an elevator. It’s now a museum and it’s classified by the UNESCO . It’s still working for tourism and yachts.
Marc
THere was something similar somewhere in Pennsylvania in the late 1800s, described in an RMC article some time ago. They would uncouple the train from the loco, attach it to something like an idler flat that was connected to a winch at the top of a steep grade. The cars were winched to the top of the grade, then coupled to another loco for continuation of the trip. This was eliminated with the advent of more powerful locos and better construction techniques used to build a bypass at a more reasonable grade.