Station conveyor
A station conveyor is a technical device in the stations of detachable cable cars and ensures the transport of vehicles that have been uncoupled from the conveyor rope.
functionality
With detachable gondola lifts and chairlifts, the means of transport, i.e. the gondolas or chairs in the stations, are uncoupled from the hoisting rope, which is constantly rotating at approx. 3 to 6 m / s, in order to offer passengers comfortable and safe entry and exit without the speed of the Having to reduce the hoisting rope and thus the rest of the railway.
The uncoupled gondolas or armchairs move in the stations on several rollers arranged on the coupling clamp, which run on steel hanging rails. The station conveyor moves the vehicles at a defined distance from the uncoupling point through the station curve back to the coupling point, for railways with several sections to the coupling point of the next section.
The speed of the station conveyor as well as the accelerator and decelerator must be synchronized with the speed of the overall system in order to ensure uniform distances between the vehicles in the station and on the conveyor rope. If the speed of the conveyor rope is reduced or increased, the speed of the station conveyor adapts.
Tire conveyor
In modern railways station funding is mostly through tire conveyor , in Switzerland also Pneuförderer called. The vehicles are moved by rows of driven friction wheels mounted parallel to the station rails , which are fitted with pneumatic tires and move the vehicles by pressing their running surface from above onto a friction plate or friction grille also arranged on the coupling clamp. To ensure safe locomotion, the distance between the tires must be so small and the friction plate long enough that two tires are always in contact with the friction surface.
Another task of the tire conveyor is to accelerate the vehicles as smoothly as possible at the coupling point from the station speed to the speed of rotation of the conveyor rope in order to clamp the coupling clamp onto the rope without any speed difference. Conversely, the vehicles must be safely braked to the station speed when uncoupling after releasing the clamp. This is achieved by differently graded speeds of the individual tires in the row arrangement that increase in the acceleration section and decrease in the deceleration section. Since at least two tires running at different speeds always have a frictional connection with the friction plate at the same time, this is associated with wear on the tires due to the resulting slip .
Chain conveyor
As an alternative to tire conveyors, chain conveyors with carriers can also be used for pure station conveyance ; these are mostly used on the station rails of the vehicle depots and gondola garages. They can also be found on older railways.
development
In older circulating ropeway systems (for example systems based on the Müller or Von Roll system - VR101 ), acceleration and deceleration were originally achieved solely by inclined ramps on the station rails on which the vehicles ran up and down. Within the stations, the vehicles were manually pushed through the station by the staff. Some of these historic systems have been retrofitted with station conveyors; For example, the chairlift to the Schneekoppe or the old Grünbergseilbahn operated manually without station conveyor systems until it was completely renovated.
literature
- Artur Doppelmayr: Food for thought to fulfill the function of monocable gondolas - project planning, construction and operation in the safety control loop system, based on the analysis of incidents , ISBN 3-9500815-1-8 , Chapter 2.3.10 f., "Station equipment" (available online as MS Word- File, 3.7 MB), last accessed December 2013
- Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn. Peter SEDIVY (lecturer): Lecture materials "Cable car construction" at the Institute for Infrastructure, Intelligent Transport Systems division of the University of Innsbruck , summer semester 2012, script for cable car construction at the University of Innsbruck, 2012 ( memo of December 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), last accessed on November 28 2015
- Stephan Liedl: Lecture notes on ropeway technology, Chair of Materials Handling, Material Flow, Logistics at the Technical University of Munich; 1999, (PDF, 10.2 MB).
Web links
The tire conveyor at the cable car dictionary
Individual evidence
- ↑ Swiss cable car inventory, cable car history - section monocable ropeways with operationally releasable vehicles (chairs and cabins) , accessed on December 24, 2013
- ↑ C. Gentil: The old Grünberg cable car at seilbahn-nostalgie.ch , accessed on December 24, 2013