A blondin installation consists essentially of a carriage which moves along a carrying cable laid between two ends. The carriage is moved by a haulage cable wound endlessly between these ends. The carriage has, fixed to it, a lifting cable which is deviated to a hook situated underneath the carriage by means of pulleys. The haulage cable and the lifting cable are moved by respective independent winches.
An installation of this type is known from U.S. Pat. No. 3,396,853, which is incorporated herein by way of reference in its entirety. As is known, the lifting and haulage cables may have variable degrees of tension during operation. The tension of the lifting cable in particular may have very low values during operation, when the hook is under no load.
Consequently it is necessary to insert along the carrying cable a certain number of cradles which act as a support for the haulage cable and the lifting cable, so as to prevent them from being subject to excessive sagging which would prevent correct operation of the system. The U.S. Pat. No. 3,396,853 cited above relates to a system where cradles are fixed to a carrying cable and keep the service cables uniformly spaced from each other and, when they are passed through by the carriage, may be traveled over by this carriage without resulting in any interference. This is achieved in that the carriage has a structure with a passage having dimensions such as to allow the cradle to pass through it and in that the distances from the point where the carriage rests on the carrying cable to the respective points where the outward haulage cable and lifting cable are housed inside the carriage are smaller than the corresponding distances on the cradle. In this way, the travel movement of the carriage when passing over a cradle causes raising of the outward haulage cable and the lifting cable by the rollers provided on the cradle.
The object of the present invention is to provide a blondin cableway installation which allows the teaching described above to be applied to a system which uses a haulage cable connected via tackle.