Abstract
In the dynamic behaviour of a cable railway oscillations of cables and cars play an important role. We present a simple model to describe and investigate oscillations of a cable, spanned over a support and charged with an arbitrary number of point loads with arbitrary masses. We construct a time-dependent propagator, which contains the full intrinsic information of the mechanical system and represents a linear map between the initial state, t=0 (initial condition of a set of linear differential equations) and the state at a time t. We consider undamped and damped oscillations, where damping is introduced by a phenomenological way (Onsager's lineare ansätze). A numerical example is given.