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entry Oct 2008 "The little cable-cars climb halfway off the drawing boards..."
The simplest cable-car would be one with
only a top and bottom station with a double-track by-pass at the
halfway point. The old, famous cable-car of funiculì-funiculà
fame on Vesuvius (not one of the four mentioned above) was
like that. The others have more stations: The Chiaia line has four
(including top and bottom, as does the Central line; the Mergellina
line has five. All of the stations are on streets, or at least close
enough so you can get out to the street via some stairs. Only the
Montesanto line has a "missing" station. The plan was to turn the blank spot on the
Montesanto line into a real station (since the car has to stop there
anyway). There is no real street at that spot that would be served by a
new station, but it would make it easier to reach the great tourist
attraction of the Sant' Elmo fortress and
adjacent San Martino museum.
That is, the way it works now is that you ride the cable-car to the
top, get off and then walk about 10-minutes over to the Vomero
look-out, overlooking the city and directly in front of both the
fortress and the museum. But, what if...heh-heh...you put a station
at that blank spot, a station that was essentially at the bottom of an
elevator shaft and then ran the elevator up to a spot on the street in
front of the museum and the fortress. It would mean tunneling over from
the track to a spot directly beneath that point and then running the
shaft up about 200 feet to the new station. It would look something
like this:
Ticket booth,
turnstiles, a spectacular view of Vesuvius, and stairs leading down to
the former "blank" station. There are four elevators not shown here. I
think you might want to walk down and enjoy the view. Maybe on the way
up from the cable-car station—named "Sant'Elmo"—you might want to
catch a lift. A plan to do all this was approved in
2001. The whole deal was going to cost five million euros and be
finished in 2005. Uh—the cable car is late. I mean really late. The new station and
interior shots shown above are artists' renditions. Work hasn't started
yet. |
Pictured (right) is one of the four
cable-cars in the city of Naples; this is the car on the Montesanto
line as it pulls into the station on the street named Corso Vittorio
Emanuele. It comes up from the main station in the city, makes this
stop and then finishes at the top station on the Vomero hill at about
600 feet. The station in the picture is about one-third of the way up;
at the half-way point, the single track will split into a double track
to allow the car coming down at the same time (the cars are on the same
cable) to pass the one going up. When the down-car then stops at this
station, the car on the way up stops at a "blank station"—an empty spot
in the tunnel—and waits. Then, they both start again and finish the run
at the bottom and top stations, respectively. The other cable cars in
Naples don't
have any "blanks" along the way; there really are stations at
those points.
