When I’ve been skiing, some of the cable car stations have a central part which moves back and forth. I am referring to the part of the station the cable is attached to (the spool?). Often there’s a small gap between the main platform and this section of the station. You have to step from the static section to the moving section.
I can’t seem to find any footage of it online, and some cable cars don’t seem to need this which confuses me. It seems like it’s taking tension in and out of the whole system, but I can’t see why that’d be necessary.
Thank you in advance for explanations!
In: Engineering
Steel expands when it heats up and contracts when it gets cold. Ski lifts and cable cars can have quite long cables. You want the tension on the cable to stay about constant. If there wasn’t a moveable section, the tension would go up as it got colder and go down as it got warmer. If it got too cold, the cable might snap. If it got too warm, things might drag on the ground. So they have the mechanism to keep the tension roughly constant so that everything works well.
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