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"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.
