16mm railway with gravity incline

In the last blog, I mentioned the gravity hauled railway system used by the Decauville works south of Paris. From a quarry on the site, a large amount of stone was extracted to help build Paris between 1860 and the 1880s. Decauville gave the young Prosper Péchot much encouragement before the two men fell out in the late 1880s. By then, however, Péchot was well advanced in his scheme to provide a true field railway system for the French Army. This detail from a print by Victor Rose shows a balanced gravity worked incline with the laden train of wagons pulling up th e'emprties'. The image is reproduced courtesy of Roger Bailly.

The principle of using gravity to take freight out of a quarry is not new. The Germans used it, then the miners of North-east England, then the quarries of North Wales.  

  So you will want to know how you could use this on your railway? This lovely scene is courtesy of Peter Kinnear of the North-East 16mm Association. This and all the following images are reproduced courtesy of Peter.

The actual prototype is rather prosaic,  being the Waste Transfer System at Powderhall, Edinburgh. Although the original is not very glamorous, Peter has made it  beautiful. As you can see from this photo showing the head of the incline, inspiration for art can be found anywhere, even in a waste transfer system!

Unlike a true gravity system, this depends on a Prime Mover, in this case what Peter calls the Mule (powerful, obstinate and inclined to be found in remote places).

You can probably see the sequence. The train gets shunted on to the incline track, leaves the wagons that are going down the hill.

Photo of the works shed on the layout of Peter Kinnear.

The 'Mule' comes from the shed, couples on, then pushes the wagons along, they start to roll down the incline and the mule carries on lowering them down. This picture, also on Peter's railway shows wagons rolling in controlled fashion down the line.

This picture shows another section of the incline on Peter's layout. 

Another section of the route on Peter's 16mm railway. The picture below shows the wagon in relationship to the train.

 
The system is not the same as on the Welsh slate quarries, Peter explains, and certainly not the same as the one shown at the Decauville works. To reproduce a true gravity worked balanced incline would have required the assistance of a lot of 16mm scale workers. As Peter puts it, in model form the system would require a lot of 'hands on'.

In this system, the 'Mule' is attached permanently to an endless cable; the winding-house powers the cable, one direction of winding taking the mule down the hill, the other direction bringing it up again.

His system is prototypical; there is an example in Edinburgh, at the Waste Transfer Station at Powderhall. There are quite a few others in the country.

If you don’t want your incline to be based on a Waste Transfer System, how about creating a system based on the San Francisco cable trams? Unlike the fabled prototype, the trams would have to be permanently attached. Again, it would be wonderful to have a 16mm ‘Gripper Man’ to stop the tram.

Useful references---

'Rope and Chain Haulage' by Colin E. Mountford. ISBN 978 1 901556
84-1 Published by the Industrial Railway Society. www.irsociety.co.uk
Decauville Ce Nom Qui Fit Le Tour Du Monde (French language) by Roger Bailly Editions Amatteis, le Mée sur Seine ISBN 2 86849-076-X