Ding ding

Here you can see the massive wheels and motors that turn the cables through the streets of San Francisco. The motors are GE electric motors that put out 510 horsepower using 500 volts and 800 amps. These are big motors. The simplicity and mechanics of the whole system just astound me, so I'm going to ramble about them for a bit.

Your average cable car line is about 5 miles long, which means it needs a 10 mile "loop" of cable to operate. This powerhouse (pictured above) is located at the approximate center of all 3 lines, which means at some points, these motors are moving a cable car full of passengers that is 2 miles or more away. Oh yeah, and your average cable car weighs 16,000 lbs before you fill it with oversized American tourists. Oh yeah, and there can be as many as 4 cars on a given route at a given time - some cars will be moving, and others will be loading/unloading passengers. Yet all cars on a given line use the same physical cable.

So these big motors pictured above to quite an amazing job. They fire them up in the morning, and shut them down at night. During the day, these motors keep the cables turning through the streets of San Francisco at a constant 9.5mph no matter what. They don't start and stop, they just run. Doesn't matter if they're moving 4 cable cars or just the cable itself. That amazes me. Plus it's 100 year old technology that is still relevant, yet for some reason computers and cell phones become horribly outdated after a year or two. And in my opinion, a cable car system is much more useful than either of those other two gadgets.