John
With any sort of rope-hauled railway incline the first prority is to determine whether the main traffic went up or down the incline. Frequently mineral tramways had the load descending so that gravity did all the work hence the self-acting incline. If the load had to ascend the incline it would be powered by some means; it could be counter-balanced so that the two loads, one up, one down, had their own separate rail tracks (like the Hays inclined plane near Ironbridge) or it could have a three-rail section for the upper third, a double track section for a passing loop, then a single track for the bottom third of the incline. However, if your site is relatively early and the traffic over it was quite light it may well have been just a single track with hauling engine at the top.
I can think of three places where the winding drum/engine was set back from the top of the incline and controlled by a man in a position at the top of the gradient with long levers/rods running back to it; Abergynolwen, narrow-gauge, self-acting; Rosedale, standard-gauge, self-acting; and Bolts Law, standard-gauge, steam engine powered.
See 'The Brecon Forest Tramroads' RCAHM(W) 1990, for some details of an early tramway system including an incline; and 'The Private Railways of County Durham', C.E.Mountford, Industrial Railway Society 2004, for nineteenth and twentieth century rope-hauled standard gauge systems.
Regards, Simon.
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