Cable railway

A cable railway is a railway that uses a cable, rope or chain to haul trains. It is a specific type of cable transportation.

For cable-hauled passenger mass transit railways, detachable from cable, see Cable car (railway). For steeply-graded passenger railways with cars fixed to the rope, see Funicular. For links between canals, see Canal inclined plane.

The most common use for a cable railway is to move vehicles on a steeply graded line that is too steep for conventional locomotives to operate on – this form of cable railway is often called an incline or inclined plane, or, in New Zealand, a jigline, or jig line. One common form of incline is the funicular – an isolated passenger railway where the cars are permanently attached to the cable. In other forms, the cars attach and detach to the cable at the ends of the cable railway. Some cable railways are not steeply graded - these are often used in quarries to move large numbers of wagons between the quarry to the processing plant.

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