Hello and bore da!
It is summer 2023
(yes, summer)
and I’m in Wales.
In fact, I’m just arriving in the seaside resort of Llandudno,
on Wales’s northern coast.
And we’re here to talk about cable-powered trams.
Cable trams (or in North America, cable cars) are a kind of tramway
where the vehicles have no motors of their own
and they move by gripping onto a moving cable
that is concealed below the surface of the street.
The first place to build them was San Francisco,
but by 1900 they were common in cities all over the United States.
And then and one by one they gradually disappeared,
and when Seattle closed its cable car in 1940,
it left only the original system in San Francisco.
But what about the rest of the world?
Did any other places have cable tramways?
What if the San Francisco cable car had one distant surviving relative
in a seaside town in North Wales?
Welcome to Llan Francisco!
This is the Great Orme Tramway,
whose beautiful old tram cars have been working
the steep hilly streets of Llandudno since 1902.
They carry you up to a 200m high summit called The Great Orme,
and with gradients reaching 1 in 3.8 (26%),
the route was always far too steep for a conventional tram.
So instead they took inspiration from San Francisco,
and decided to winch the trams up the hill,
using a cable concealed in a small trench in the middle of the road.
It is the last remaining tramway of this type in Britain
and it’s pretty much the closest you can get to the San Francisco Cable Cars
outside of San Francisco.
But in that case, how many other cities used to have cable tramways?
And why did they all just… die out?
Well let’s hop on, and I’ll try to explain it all.
When San Francisco launched the first cable cars in 1873
they were a major upgrade on the previous horse-drawn trams.
They had the obvious advantage of being able to go up steep hills without getting tired,
but they soon started replacing horses in flatter cities as well,
for the simple reason that they didn’t produce anywhere near as much poo.
Admittedly they weren’t very good at going round corners
but let’s face it, on American streets that often didn’t matter.
And by the 1890s, there were more than 30 systems operating in US cities alone.
But the US was not the only country that built them.
After San Francisco, the next city to build a cable tramway was Dunedin in New Zealand;
then London built the first one in Europe,
Melbourne, Australia built one of the largest ever systems,
and there was even one line in Paris.
Broadly, cable trams can be split into two main categories:
there are simpler systems where the vehicles are permanently attached to the cable,
and more complicated ones where they use a type of adjustable grip.
And we’ll come to those in a moment.
But in Llandudno, the trams are permanently attached,
so when the cable moves we move too.
In other words, it works like a funicular railway,
except at the same time it’s a tram,
and it has to deal with road traffic and junctions and things like that.
So, one question:
What happens if we need to stop?
Well I don’t to worry everyone,
but the driver can’t actually stop the tram themselves.
Instead, they have to send a signal up to the winding engineer,
who sits the engine room at the top of the hill,
and tell them to stop winding the cable.
The tram is fitted with brakes, but they can’t stop the cable from moving
and therefore they’re not going to stop us from moving either;
they’re only there in case we accidentally detach from the cable
and start rolling back down the hill.
Therefore, in order to give us enough time to stop in emergencies,
the tram has to be limited to 5 miles an hour.
And of course if we ever do have to stop,
it means all the other trams on the line have to stop as well.
That’s bad enough when there are only two trams on the cable, like there are here;
but in San Francisco you can have something like a dozen vehicles
all running on the same cable.
So how does that work?
Well the short answer is: it works differently.
In San Francisco, the cars can stop and start independently of the cable.
And they do that by simply letting go of it.
Each vehicle is fitted with a mechanical grabby thing, technically called a “grip”,
and that grips on to the cable.
But how much it grips on to the cable
can be adjusted by the person operating the car.
Confusingly that person is also technically called a “grip”.
So just to clarify:
in order to stop a San Francisco cable car,
the grip loosens the grip of the grip until it no longer grips.
At that point they can apply the brakes and the car comes to a stop.
And then, when they want to move off again,
the grip gently grips the grip until it grips again
and off you go.
Hope that makes sense.
And meanwhile back in Wales, things are about to get even more confusing,
because we have now reached the station at the end of the line,
only to find out that it’s called "Half Way Station".
Instead of building one single line from the bottom all the way to the top
they split it into two separate parts.
In other words, at Half Way Station, you have to get off the first tram,
walk all the way through the station building,
past a load of interesting stuff that you don’t really have time to look at,
until you come out the other end,
where an almost identical tram is waiting for you,
in order to complete the second half of the journey.
And from this point onwards, we leave the town behind,
the scenery becomes a little wilder,
and there’s no more San Francisco style street running.
Up here, there’s enough space for the tram to have its own dedicated track,
so there’s no need to complicate things.
And in a way, that sums up the story of the cable tramways.
The moment a simpler solution became available, we did that instead.
The first San Francisco cable cars were less than a decade old
when the first electric trams started to appear.
They had almost all of the same benefits,
plus they were cheaper to build, and simpler to operate,
and they took over.
In hilly cities the cable trams held out for a bit longer,
but then got replaced by buses as soon as they could do the job.
So it was a brief Golden Age.
And these days the only other street-running cable tramways still in existence
are the lovely funicular trams of Lisbon.
But the Great Orme Tramway is longer than the three Lisbon lines combined,
so if you really want to experience the Golden Age of street-running cable tramways,
I don’t think there’s any better place than
well, San Francisco.
But there is no second better place
than here, in this beautiful little corner of North Wales.
(Shame about the weather.)
If you’d like to take a ride on the world-famous San Francisco Cable Car
but you live in Europe
and you’re on a budget,
the Great Orme Tramway runs 7 days a week from April until the end of summer
and departures are every 20 minutes during the day.
A return ticket costs £10.90 for adults,
or £1.15 for dogs,
and the trams can accommodate wheelchairs and pushchairs as long as they are foldable.
Meanwhile Llandudno itself is only a couple of hours by train from Manchester.
And as always, thank you very much for watching,
and I’ll see you soon.