Chilecito-La Mejicana material ropeway

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The Chilecito-La Mejicana material cable car in Argentina was the longest cable car in the world in its day and was also the cable car with the highest mountain station until the construction of the material cable cars on Aucanquilcha and Ollagüe (long before the Merida cable car was built between 1958 and 1960).

The material ropeway was built in 1903 and 1904 to connect Chilecito , a village in the Argentine province of La Rioja at an altitude of 1,076 m, with the Mina la Mejicana mine, which is located on the eastern slope of the Sierra de Famatina at an altitude of over 4,600 m .

The 35 km long cable car led with inclines of up to 45 ° over impassable, mountainous terrain and overcame an altitude difference of 3528 m, which has not been exceeded to this day.

history

Chilecito had a meter-gauge railway connection to Cordoba since 1899 ; from there, wide ( 1676 mm ) and meter- gauge lines continue to the port city of Rosario on the Río Paraná, 500 km off the coast, and to the capital Buenos Aires .

The ore mines in the Famatina Mountains have been known for centuries, but could only be exploited very superficially due to the lack of timber in the forestless landscape and because of the limited transport options. Every year around 4000 tons of gold, silver and copper ore were brought to small metal smelters near Famatina or Chilecito by mules . The most famous pits were on the La Mejicana ridge , named after Mexican immigrants who dug here.

Although the pits, which are up to 5000 m high, were only 35 km as the crow flies from Chilecito , one had to walk 120 to 150 km on mule tracks, which could be life-threatening in the event of sudden weather changes or early snowfall.

After the completion of the railway connection, a British company took over the Famatina mines from the government on condition that they create a connection from Chilecito to the mining district.

After long studies and numerous drafts, the company Adolf Bleichert & Co. , Leipzig - Gohlis , received the order from the Argentine government to build a cable car based on the German design of the Bleichert company, i.e. a two-cable car with a fixed carrying and circulating pull cable , to build. However, no cable cars of similar length or similar inclines had been built anywhere, and in a completely inaccessible area where later repairs would hardly be possible.

The existing maps were extremely unreliable, so the area first had to be thoroughly explored and surveyed. It turned out that a direct route would have partly run in a river bed, so that deviated from the straight line and angles were provided in the intermediate stations.

In order to bring the building material to the route, a 50 km long path from Chilecito to the ore mines with branch paths to the route had to be built. A total of 110 km of paths were laid out.

The actual construction work began in October 1903 and was completed in December 1904.

At times up to 1200 construction workers were working on the route, almost all of them were immigrants from various countries, except for the German locksmiths sent by the company. In the lower areas ten to twelve hours a day were worked, in the higher sections only eight and only in good weather. The working groups divided along the route, which slowly worked their way upwards, each had their own cook who was responsible for their catering and who “hiked” with them.

Work and assembly areas, warehouses and accommodation had to be built. The transport took place with 600 mules, most recently under time pressure with around 1000 pack animals. When designing the cable car, it had to be taken into account that the individual parts weighed no more than 150 kg, if possible. The ropes were unwound and carried up the mountain in groups of sixty to several hundred men.

On January 1, 1905, the cable car was put into operation.

technology

The route with a (horizontally measured) length of 34.328 km was divided into 8 sections with 7 intermediate stations. The length of the sections fluctuated between 2 km and 9 km, the height differences in the sections between 150 m and 667 m and the gradients between an average of 5 ° and 29 °, but reached up to 45 ° in individual sections.

The sections had a carrying rope for each direction and a circulating pull rope.

The suspension ropes with diameters of 22 mm to 35 mm (in the uppermost sections) were each firmly anchored at the upper end of a section, mounted freely movable on the carrying shoes of the supports and tensioned at the lower end with concrete weights.

The pull ropes with a diameter of 18 mm had a tension of at least 3000 kg to 5000 kg. They consisted of tough cast steel with a strength of 180 kg / mm² and a calculated breaking strength of 22,000 kg.

Between the stations there were tensioning devices for the suspension ropes in order to keep the stations unloaded from the tension weights.

In the intermediate stations, the transport buckets rolled on hanging tracks without stopping to the next section, but could also be parked on pull-out tracks or deflected in the opposite direction.

The cable car had around 275 supports with which spans of up to 900 m could be overcome. The highest pillar at 50 m was in very steep terrain.

A 4.5 m wide and 4 m high tunnel with a length of 300 m (with fixed tracks) was also built in the route, which had a slight gradient on both sides for drainage.

The car passed because of the high bulk weight of the ores of relatively small buckets that with a simple hanger on the two-roll drive were attached. These wagons with a weight of approx. 200 kg and a payload of 500 kg thus weighed a total of up to 700 kg. They drove at the then high speed of 2.5 m / s (9 km / h) with a car sequence of 112 m at intervals of 45 seconds.

When constructing the iron structures, the large temperature differences, strong winds, as well as snow and ice on the ropes had to be taken into account. At the mountain station the temperatures were practically always below freezing point, the winter temperatures dropped to minus 20 ° C.

The fully automatic coupling of the wagons to the hauling cables was therefore of the utmost importance. The wagons had to be connected to the running traction cable without bumps, the couplings were not allowed to slip on the inclines, even if the cables were icy. The transitions in the stations had to take place regularly. Should a car derail, it was not allowed to get caught on the rope. The couplings had to cope with the inevitably different rope diameters, as ropes quickly elongated and their diameters decreased by several millimeters.

The Bleichert system of closing the coupling by the weight of the car, which presses a jaw in the carriage with great force on the pulling rope, not only met these requirements, but also enabled the pulling rope to always run vertically under the carrying rope and thus the car even with large ones Slopes cannot be pulled from the vertical.

A special drive would not have been necessary on the steeper stretches, since a drive based solely on the weight of the ore buckets would have been sufficient. Only in the flat sections did the pull ropes have to be driven by steam engines. To start up the system and for safety reasons, however, steam engines with 35 HP were installed in all sections.

At the unloading station in the valley, the buckets were emptied into ore bunkers; from there the ore was loaded into railroad cars. The unloading station had a high-speed scale and a counting device for the delivery quantities with connected self-printers.

Most of the intermediate stations had lounges, bedrooms and small workshops.

The cable car was used to transport the ores down into the valley. On the other hand, all supplies, water, food, fuel, timber, spare parts, etc. had to be transported upwards. To a limited extent, people were also transported in special wagons, especially the track keepers. Even the Argentine postal administration used the cable car to transport their letters and parcels.

There were therefore special wagons for long items such as beams, iron girders, etc. and four-seat, closed passenger gondolas with windows, a door that could be closed by hand and a compartment for a water supply and for small luggage or mail.

To supply the stations, there were also special water trucks with metal barrels hung in the hangers, which received the water from a spring at the filling station in station IV.

There was a special lubrication wagon for the suspension ropes, the drive wheels of which drove a small pump attached to the drive, which sucked oil from an oil drum on the platform through a metal pipe and sprayed it in a fine jet between the drive wheels on the suspension cable, where it was still through Brushes was distributed. One filling was enough for 10 km.

The pull ropes were lubricated by lubricating devices in the stations, where the rope ran over a pulley, the lower part of which was dipped in oil or varnish. Here, too, brushes ensured the continued even distribution.

With these special cars, the cable car had a total of 640 cars.

The stations were connected to one another by a telephone system that was independent of the cable car and whose lines ran over 4 m high telephone masts. In addition, there were portable knapsack devices and plug contacts every 1000 m into which the track keepers could plug in to speak to the next station.

The plant had an hourly output from 40 t upwards and 20 t upwards.

The Chilecito-La Mejicana cable car was the first cable car for such versatile transport.

business

The cable car was operated by officials of the Argentine government, analogous to the principles applicable to a railway, with staff distributed over all stations.

The total travel time was around 4 hours. The speed has been reduced to 1.5 m / s for passenger journeys.

Initially, the railway was not used to capacity for 24 hours, as the planned output of the mines had not yet been reached.

The cable car was taken out of service in 1920 (according to other sources in 1926). The remaining remains are still maintained as a historical site.

In Chilecito there is the Museo de Cable Carril museum for the cable car.

  • Sierra de Famatina as seen from Chilecito

  • Station 1

  • Transport bucket in station 1

  • View from Station 2 to Chilecito

  • Station 2

  • Cut in the terrain

  • Station 8

  • Entrance to the La Mejicana mine

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ La Mejicana mine
  2. ^ The development of the northern Argentine Cordillera by means of a Bleichert cable car for goods and people , G. Dieterich in: Journal of the Association of German Engineers, November 3, 1906, No. 44, Volume 50, pp. 1769–1778, pp. 1826–1831, Pp. 1867-1870. (Spelling carefully adjusted: Wolfgang Morscher. © digital version: www.sagen.at)
  3. ↑ The mountain station of the discontinued Meridabahn is at an altitude of 4765 m
  4. ↑ The coordinates are: Valley station in Chilecito: 29 ° 10 ′ 49.5 ″  S , 67 ° 29 ′ 30.1 ″  W ; Station 2: 29 ° 7 '58.9 "  S , 67 ° 33' 56.5"  W ; Station 3: 29 ° 5 '22.1 "  S , 67 ° 38' 10.6"  W ; Station 4: 29 ° 4 '7 "  S , 67 ° 39' 28.2"  W ; Incision: 29 ° 3 '50.4 "  S , 67 ° 39' 48.4"  W ; Tunnel, lower entrance: 29 ° 3 ′ 41.1 ″  S , 67 ° 39 ′ 57.9 ″  W ; Incision: 29 ° 3 ′ 13.6 "  S , 67 ° 40 ′ 28.7"  W ; Station 5: 29 ° 2 '56.5 "  S , 67 ° 40' 48.3"  W ; Station 6: 29 ° 2 '25.1 "  S , 67 ° 41' 46.9"  W ; Station 7: 29 ° 1 '57.1 "  S , 67 ° 43' 7.5"  W ; Edge transition: 29 ° 1 ′ 28.1 ″  S , 67 ° 43 ′ 50.5 ″  W ; Station 8: 29 ° 0 '56.3 "  S , 67 ° 44' 38.2"  W ; Clamping station: 29 ° 0 ′ 48 ″  S , 67 ° 46 ′ 2.6 ″  W ; Mountain station: 29 ° 0 ′ 45.5 ″  S , 67 ° 46 ′ 30.1 ″  W
  5. ↑ Website about Adolf Bleichert and his company ( Memento from October 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

Commons : Chilecito-La Mejicana material ropeway  - collection of images, videos and audio files