If you are visiting once in a lifetime - take or leave my best advice:
It is very often considerable more cold and windy at the top than at the bottom of the mountain. You can’t necessarily judge the weather on top by what you encounter at the lower cableway station, so be prepared for a nasty cold and sharp wind on top, something that could potentially spoil your enjoyment when dressed inappropriately or forced to wait to go down.
The cableway is usually busier after a few days of bad weather. Queues at the bottom can be more than two hours in peak season during holidays, starting long before the cableway opens! If the wait exceeds two hours and you are reasonably fit, consider walking up. The easiest route is past the cache, keep going and follow the signs to and up Platteklip Gorge (take water). There could also be a queue on top, waiting to go down! See previous point about the weather!
The cableway’s opening hours change at the first of every month. Get your times right to maximise your visit. If you are lucky enough to catch one of those perfect evenings in the fairest Cape, stay on top as long as you can to see the city lights coming on in the dark.
IF THE WEATHER IS GOOD the last car down will not be earlier than the advertised time, though the siren may ring well before that, usually thrice. Make your way to the top station on time.
IF THE WEATHER IS BAD OR WINDY the cableway may be closed at any time. Worst case scenario – you stay up or walk down. See previous point about the weather!!
On tablemountain.net you can see an update about the weather and the waiting times, but check when it was updated as the info may be several hours old. Once you are on top, you may find free wifi near the cablestation’s wifi lounge in the upper cable station.
Some history:
Before the Cableway was established, the only way up Cape Town’s iconic mountain was by foot – a climb undertaken only by adventurous souls, such as the famous Capetonian, Lady Anne Barnard. By the late 1870s, several of Cape Town’s more prominent (and possibly less fit) citizens had suggested the introduction of a railway to the top. Plans to build a rack railway were proposed, but implementation was halted by the outbreak of the First Anglo-Boer War in 1880.
By 1912, engineer HM Peter was commissioned by the Cape Town City Council to investigate options for a public transport system, and a funicular railway from Oranjezicht through Platteklip Gorge was suggested. In a referendum on the matter, the vast majority of Cape Town’s residents voted in favour of the funicular – despite the staggering cost of £100 000 (an immense amount of money in those days).
Plans for this were halted once again by the outbreak of the First World War, before a Norwegian engineer named Trygve Stromsoe suggested a cableway in 1926.
The scheme caught the interest of a group of influential businessmen after Stromsoe approached Sir Alfred Hennessy and showed him a functioning scale model of his idea. Hennessy and fellow investors, Sir David Graaff and Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, formed The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway Company (TMACC) to finance construction, with Stromsoe taking the fourth seat on the board of directors. After two years of tireless and often dangerous work, the Cableway was opened in 1929 and has a proud history of being totally accident-free since then.
The cableway has been upgraded three times – in 1958, 1974 and, more recently, in 1997, when the cars with revolving floors, called Rotairs, were introduced. Cable cars similar to the ones used at Table Mountain are in use at Titlis in Switzerland and Palm Springs in the United States. The cable cars take visitors up 704m, from the Lower Cable Station at 363m above sea level to the Upper Cable Station at 1 067m above sea level. source:tablemountain.net
