For details of design etc of ropeways, there is a whole section in
Peele's Mining Engineers' Handbook on "Aerial Tramways and
Cableways" (otherwise known, it says, as Ropeways). In my
Third Edition, this runs to 51 pages, and has line drawings to
illustrate points of design.
One example it quotes is the ropeway which was running at
Indian Copper Corporation, Chota Nagpur, Bihar, India when I
was there in 1958-60. This had been built in 1928 by Ropeways Ltd,
London. A mono-cable tramway, it was 31,050 feet long, including one
single span over the Subharnarekha river of 975 feet which got it into
the record books when built..
The U.K. manufacturers of ropeways listed by Peele are:
Ropeways Ltd, 152 Great Portland Street, London.
British Ropeways Engineering Co (BRECO), 14 High Holborn, London.
R. White & Sons, Widnes.
By the time I was in Bihar, Ropeways Ltd must have been taken over by
BRECO, as that was the firm then associated with the ropeway. As I
recall, both R.White & Sons and BRECO were still advertising in Mining
Magazine in the 1960s.
In about 1969 or so I went on a visit to quarries in the Channel Islands
on a trip organised by the London and Southern Counties branch of the
Institute of Quarrying. One deep granite quarry on Guernsey was using
a blondin to raise quarried material out of the pit. Land use was so
intense, they were going "straight" down, and a blondin was the only
economic way of lifting granite blocks up to surface level. They had
to be circumspect with their blasting, as the quarry was surrounded
by greenhouses!
Tony Brewis
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