Post by chrisbilton

LEGO cable car. Image by Flickr user Pascal. (Creative commons.)

LEGO lovers have always known that the colourful toy bricks can be a (nubby) pathway to a future in architecture or urban design. Last month, The Guardian wrote an in-depth piece exploring just how useful LEGOs might be to actual life-sized city-building endeavours. We’re partial to seeing how people translate CPT technology into something that could carry those tiny smiling figures around a small-scale city or up to the peak of a plastic mountain. Here are a few of our favourite LEGO cable cars:

Detachable 3S — Kuppelbare Seilbahn
The detailed work here is nothing short of mind blowing—especially everything involved in moving the cabins around once they’re detached.

LEGO Mindstorms cable car and shuttle train
Here’s a fun perspective shot of this straightforward yet effective design. Bonus points for linking the cable car to another form of transit, which, as we know, is key to the viability of any system as public transit.

LEGO aerial tramway
The cinematography is perhaps more impressive than the design here, but we appreciate that at, one point, they track the wind speed to gauge how the gondola is performing in realistic conditions.

Meine kuppelbare Seilbahn aus LEGO
Here’s another detachable gondola, though this time with just one cable. Again, it’s nice to see it functioning outdoors, and that they’ve taken great pains to make fairly realistic cabins.

Fully functioning 3S cable car
We’ve highlighted this one before, but here is an updated video that intercuts footage of an actual gondola with the LEGO version so you can better see how the makers replicated the technology.