On Mon, 13 Nov 2017 13:46:52 -0000
"NY" wrote:

"Andy Burns" wrote in message
...
Chris J Dixon wrote:
Going over the top, though frowned upon, _had_ to be done It
was a little unnerving, as it got noisier and there was a bit of
vibration, being near the drive motors, but not actually as
hazardous as getting on and off normally.

Do paternosters keep the car the same way up or do they invert it as
it goes over the top? Or are there two different sorts, with the
added fun being "is this the inverting sort?".

No, your feet remained downwards at all times! A bit bumpy as it went
under or over the top, but good fun ;-)

I imagine that paternosters are good where some people are going to
all the floors and therefore a conventional lift would have to stop
at each (with deceleration and acceleration at each floor), but are
very slow if most of the people are going from the ground to the top
floor, and therefore the paternoster has to go slowly (for safety of
people who might have been getting on/off at each floor) where a
conventional lift could accelerate to a faster speed when bypassing
the intermediate floors. And also they are not good if a lot of
people want to get on/off and have to all do so within a fairly small
window of time while the lift floor is still within jumping distance
of the building floor.

A little like the underground really. If you couldn't get in one,
another would be along. In a few seconds in this case.

Because only so many people could get on and off in the limited time
available they weren't as crowded as a conventional lift car could be.

I only remember it running at a fixed speed but there were never long
queues as there were quite a few lift cars in the chain.

This was circa 1975/7 at Crawley Technical College. Went back there in
the 80s and they had been replaced by normal lifts with the typical
queues.

They worked very well and I never heard of any accidents but Health &
Safety types obviously got their way :-(