Every machine that lifts something has to put energy in somewhere.<\/p>\n
Usually that is obvious. A motor, a fuel line, a cable from a substation, something that hums.<\/p>\n
This one has none of that, and it has never had any of it.<\/p>\n
What it has instead is a hillside<\/strong> and a river above the hillside.<\/p>\n The energy was collected by weather and delivered by geography.<\/p>\n The machine simply lets it go<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The arrangement is a funicular, which means the two cars are tied to opposite ends of the same cable over a pulley at the top.<\/p>\n Neither car is lifted in the usual sense. One descends and the other comes up, and the rope only has to carry the difference between them.<\/p>\n That difference is what the water is for. Each car sits on a tank, and at the top station the tank is filled from a header supply until the balance tips<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The upper car then rolls down under its own weight, dragging the lower car up behind it, with a driver controlling the speed rather than supplying any force.<\/p>\n At the bottom the tank is emptied out, the water runs away to the sea, and the car is light again for its turn to be pulled back up.<\/p>\n Nothing recovers the water. It is used once, on the way down, and then it is gone.<\/p>\n Which sounds wasteful and is the whole point<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The line links two villages on the north coast of Devon, one on the shore and one on the clifftop above it.<\/p>\n The track runs 862 feet with a vertical rise of 500 feet, which works out at a gradient near 58 percent.<\/p>\n Gauge is an odd 3 feet 8 inches, and each of the two cars takes up to 40 passengers<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The tanks hold 700 imperial gallons apiece, about 840 in US measure.<\/p>\n Water reaches the top station through 5 inch pipes running more than a mile from a river inland.<\/p>\n So the supply is a stream, a length of pipe and a downhill slope<\/strong>, and there is nothing else in the chain.<\/p>\n An Act of Parliament authorized the line in 1888, and it opened on Easter Monday, the seventh of April in 1890.<\/p>\n The design came from a civil engineer, the money from a publisher who had made a fortune in magazines, and the construction from a contractor in the town who contributed to the design himself.<\/p>\n All three put their names on the brake patent, filed in June of 1888.<\/p>\n It is described as the first public water powered total loss funicular in the country, and it has run ever since<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The two waiting rooms were listed in June of 1995.<\/p>\n A landslip in 2018 closed it for safety checks, which is the sort of interruption a Victorian cliff railway occasionally gets<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The line uses no purchased power, and that is not the same as using none.<\/p>\n Rain lifted the water onto the moor and the river carries it, so the energy came from the sun by way of the weather, banked in the height of the catchment.<\/p>\n The system also cannot run without that catchment. In a long dry spell the supply is the constraint, and no amount of clever engineering makes water where there is none<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Continuous operation deserves its qualifier too. Wars, repairs, landslips and inspections have interrupted it, and the phrase means the railway was never abandoned rather than never stopped.<\/p>\n The braking is where the real engineering hides, in the way that the interesting part of a very old machine<\/a> or a major crossing<\/a> usually sits somewhere unglamorous<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Four independent brake systems were fitted, and the hydraulic ones run on water rather than oil, as the operator’s own description<\/a> of the mechanism sets out.<\/p>\n The detail that makes this worth telling is not the water. It is how often the water is unnecessary.<\/p>\n The cars are balanced when both tanks are full, so what actually decides the direction is the difference in load, and passengers are load.<\/p>\n Put more people in the upper car than the lower one and the thing will go on its own. The driver discharges nothing, opens no valve, and the trip runs entirely on the weight of the tourists standing in it.<\/p>\n On a busy summer day that happens repeatedly, which means the busier the railway gets the less it consumes.<\/p>\n Almost no transport system anywhere works that way round, as the transport heritage record<\/a> for the line notes.<\/p>\n The cliff railway<\/strong> was never really powered by water.<\/p>\n It is powered by the imbalance<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every machine that lifts something has to put energy in somewhere. Usually that is obvious. A motor, a fuel line, a cable from a substation, something that hums. This one has none of that, and it has never had any of it. What it has instead is a hillside and a river above the hillside. The energy … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":2953,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobility"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2753"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2954,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753\/revisions\/2954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Two cars on one rope and a tank between them<\/h2>\n
The hill and the pipe that feeds it<\/h2>\n
Built by a publisher and a local contractor<\/h2>\n
Where the no power claim needs a footnote<\/h2>\n
The days when it costs nothing at all<\/h2>\n