cable cars

[sonic81]

this is a bit of a wierd question but its been bugging me for a while.when constructing cable cars how do they get the wire from a to b?seen a cable car in barcelona that seemed to travel really far and wondered about the wire?i know i need to get a life.

[ACtheTROLL]

a really really big bow and arrow

failing that two blokesa donkey and a ladder

[TCL-MUMPING]

Do they use a special donkey to climb the ladder?

[ChuckFickens]

Yes, but those days arboreal donkeys are getting harder and harder to find.

So these days they would normally either...

Fix cable at one end, hoist cable to the top of pole at other end and then just pull it tight.

Or

use a smaller gauge cable that's easy to get in place to pull the larger cable up and round the towers

[paddiez]

ChuckFickens is right. Watched them put new cables on the Table Mountain cable car in South Africa.Very thin using a helicopter then thicker and thicker. Lucky me, my workshop was right below them.

[barkly]

Riddle me this, there was a documentary about a bridge somewhere in south america (I forget where exactly) and it is a couple of hundred yards across over a sheer drop of hundreds of feet of deep chasm.

No one knows for certain how these people did it but the best suggestion so far is that one of them had a lightweight piece of string tied round his waist and climbed down one side of the gorge and up the other side and pulled the thick rope which was attached to the string across the chasm.

However the real question is this, how did they then make a perfectly serviceable bridge from this initial single piece of rope? A bridge incidentally which has stood now for more than a thousand years