Longest Road Of Rope

Northern Advocate, 6 January 1948, Page 5

Longest Road Of Rope

SYDNEY.—A start will be made soon on the building of Australia s longest bucket ropeway—a 12£-miie double cable from Penrith to carry materials to the Warragamba Dam. The contract for the work has been let by the Water Board to a South Australian firm, the Perry Engineering Co., Ltd., in association with British Ropeway Engineering Co., London. The contract price is £353,454.

The ropeway will haul gravel and sand from McCann’s Island, Penrith, to Warragamba, to make concrete for the dam. During the five years in which it will be in operation the ropeway will haul more than 2,500,000 tons of materials. The system is driven by electricallyoperated motors. Buckets filled with metal will slide along a steel cable every 30 seconds on a two and a half hours’ journey to the dam site. Each bucket will hold one and a half tons of gravel. 370 TONS AN HOUR The maximum capacity of the system will be 170 tons an hour, with more than 500 buckets in use. The loading station at Penrith will have devices for automatically loading, despatching and spacing the buckets. The whole process is operated by one man pulling a lever. The unloading station is entirely automatic and the whole 12 miles of cable system is staffed by only 11 men.

The cost of the system was rather a shock to the Water Board. It -works out at £36.700 a mile, or three and a half times the pre-war cost of the Kandos ropeway. Still, the chairman (Mr T. 11. Upton) and the engineer-in-chief (Mr S. T. Farnsworth) believe the system will be cheaper in the longer run than motor transport, and more satisfactory.