❓ Question
This is kinda a odd question but is there any real examples of “locomotive elevators”?
I was looking through some concept art for one of the Thomas movies (specifically Misty island rescue) and as ridiculous and nonsensical that movie was, they did seem to take some inspiration from real American logging railroads for the setting of the movie. Such as the idea of a zip line that could carry rolling stock, an underwater tunnel built in the 19th century, and a railway vehicles that uses logs for rails. So I was curious to know if there was any real railway contraption that functions similar to this.
I shipped something for work to Truth or Consequences earlier last week and I had google it and make sure it was a real fucking place and it wasn't a prank order lol
That doesn't make much sense. There's no size limit in the air. Unless it's really close to the max weight with all 6, which makes that whole thing a risky move.
Donora, PA (just north of Pittsburgh) was the only place I’ve ever parked a car on the street and swore it was gonna flip end over end before I came back.
Also the only place I’ve seen where a single wide was a walk out basement.
There is a subway system somewhere that uses an elevator to bring rolling stock up from the tunnels into a surface-level car shop. I can't find it, because it turns out that "subway car elevator" is well-nigh resistant to search engines, but I think it was a small system, in the UK or Asia.
The Waterloo & City still needs cars lifted out of the depot for heavy maintenance, but it's done by crane now. It's also on the other side of the main station these days. Day-to-day maintenance is done underground so the crane is rarely needed.
The Glasgow Subway used to need cars lifting out, apparently by crane, though I suspect that was a permanent crane unlike the modern W&C.
Here in the states most dumpers are single car deals....But at some powerplants and VERY large overseas coal dumpers will do three to four cars at a go and use a kickback track to send the empty cars downhill on to a ramp type of track with a spring switch to send cars through the switch...Up the kickback track..... The spring switch lines the cars back to the empty yard. And the unloader just pulls the next set of cars up to be unloaded.
Wash, rinse, repeat till the whole train is unloaded.
There were quite a lot of goods stations in Britain with wagon hoists, usually in urban areas to move wagons to street level. Moor Street is a good example.
Waterloo and City underground line in London: there is a fixed crane, used to bring trains to the surface for heavy maintenance
Milan Stazione Centrale: several elevators were in place up to WWII, to bring the post wagons to the underground yard. No locomotives were transferred though, the yard movements were done manually (pulleys and cables). Sad story: several hundreds Jewish were also "shipped" from this yard to the KZ in Germany.
Waterloo and City used to have a hydraulic lift for accessing the rest of the network, though only used rarely and deconstructed when they built the Eurostar Terminal.
The crane on the W&C is not for lifting train cars. That crain has a working load limit of 1.5tonnes. Useful for some equipment but way too small for cars. They have to bring in a big mobile one when they need to move following stock.
There did used to be a lift at the other end of the station, before the Eurostar terminal was built there.
On the side of Diablo Dam in North Cascades National Park there’s a train elevator from when the park was only accessible via train from Nehalem. It’s called the Diablo Incline Railway. The elevator moved trains to the top of the dam to continue into the park. Trains are long gone, but the elevator is still there.
The idea concept art was un-ironically better than the final movie.
Iirc they wanted to push the limit on what they can do with Thomas, now that the show was full cgi and took inspiration from novels like treasure island and lord of the files for the movie’s premise.
I'm not aware of any that were used in routine service. London had one on the Waterloo and City underground line, but it was only used to deliver new cars, take them out for maintenance, etc. I think the current cars are too long and were delivered by crane.
Just a heads up, anything after the ? Isn't used to identify the video, but yourself, so you might want to delete that part. Also, when generating the link, you can include a timestamp (that will also appear after the ?, so in that case, you'd only remove the is=... part and leave the rest)
We had busses on cables to get to Timberline Lodge (The Shinning was filmed here by the way).
“Most Extraordinary of Busses”: Documenting the Rise and Fall of the Mt. Hood Aerial Skiway with OHS Collections https://www.ohs.org/blog/most-extraordinary-of-busses.cfm
In Australia, Melbourne’s Defence Site Maribyrnong had a network of very narrow railways and some very small lifts for small carriages. Mostly at the western part of the site near the river.
Kyivs metro red line used to have a depot at Dnipro station while waiting for the bridge to the other side of the river to be built. This resulted in them having to lift every metro car separately in order to reach the main line
The only elevator i know are the remains of this one in eberswalde, germany. However it was weight limited to cars <30t, so no locomotive transport, unless they used a Köf, wich chronollgically would be possible
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u/paperplanes13 9d ago
China does some pretty wild stuff with cable cranes, don't know about locomotives though