When you drape a big city over a group of mountains, you end up with a lot of stairs, hairpin streets, and workarounds. Wellington, New Zealand, is such a city. Public transport is offered by cable cars, which lift people uphill and then downhill like in San Francisco. But there are also around 100 private cable cars that people install just to reach their house! While that may seem extravagant, it will come in handy when you buy a new table, or break your leg, or come home drunk, or want to invite Grandma to visit. And if you want to stay in your Wellington hillside home through your advanced years, a private cable car, or "inclinator," makes a lot of sense. Tom Scott shows us how these private cable cars work in Wellington.
Where I live, there are a lot of houses that cling to the sides of mountains, too, but they are spread out enough that we can build access roads and bridges to reach them. I can tell you from experience that some of those roads out in the middle of nowhere are terrifying.
In Dubuque, Iowa, there is a funicular that was built for a banker that lived up hill from where he worked. He wanted to go home for lunch but did not have time to hike up and down the hillside, so he had the funicular built.
ReplyDeleteIt is fun to ride on--the seats are not parallel to the hillside so the ride is nicer (the seats is parallel to flat ground).
2023 will mark the 141st year of the Iowa funicular (its first run was on July 25, 1882), which is still there and is still in service. Its official name is the Fenelon Place Elevator and runs up what is locally known as Kelly's Bluff, from W 4th Street at the bottom to Fenelon Place at the top of the incline.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.fenelonplaceelevator.com/about/
The elevator actually has two cars that run side-by-side (so that one car is going uphill at the same time the second car is descending the incline) on three railroad-style rails. They share the center rail except at the middle of the run, when the rails flare out to create two parallel tracks to permit the cars to pass each other. Not only does this mean that there is a car is always available at each end, the two-car system also employs the force of gravity so that a relatively small engine is all that is needed to operate the funicular.
It's still there and in service, with hours of operation from 8 AM to 10 PM daily from April 1st to November 30th (except Thanksgiving Day). So, since Dubuque is only about 35 miles east of Dyersville (the site of the Field of Dreams farm and ballfield from the 1990 movie), if you're in the area to see the movie site, it's only about a half-hour drive from to Dubuque to take an elevator ride, too.
-"BB"-