Abstract: Friction and wear between heavy-load transmission wire ropes and sheaves are inevitable during service. The wear evolution leads performance degradation of the wire rope. This greatly reduces the service safety and reliability of the transmission system equipment, and threatens the life and property safety of operators. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the sliding tribological properties between the wire rope and the sheave, and to reveal the influence of surface wear on the degradation of mechanical properties of the rope. Although many scholars have been carried out a large number of studies on the wear of wire rope, those mainly focus on the fretting wear between internal wires and the sliding wear between wire ropes. Additionally, few studies on mechanical properties of the wire rope with different surface wear were conducted. There is still a certain gap between the existing research and the actual service conditions of transmission wire rope, which cannot provide guidance for accurate evaluation of the service state of wire ropes. With the aim to study the evolution mechanism of friction and wear characteristics of wire rope, the friction and wear experiments between wire rope and sheave under different sliding distance were carried out using a homemade test rig. Then, the breaking tensile tests and bending fatigue tests of the rope sample with different surface wear were conducted by customized experimental apparatus for mechanical properties of the wire rope. For the friction characteristics, the variations of the friction coefficient and friction temperature rise were obtained by the data acquisition system and an infrared thermal imaging instrument, respectively. For the wear characteristics, the distribution characteristics and size parameters of the wear scars of the wire rope were analyzed by an optical microscope. Additionally, the wear morphology mechanisms were studied by a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Furthermore, the influences of different surface wear states on residual tensile strength and bending fatigue life of rope samples were analyzed by the two kinds of mechanical performance tests. Moreover, the fracture failure mechanisms of worn wire ropes were investigated by the optical microscope and SEM. The results showed that the friction coefficient between the wire rope and the sheave decreases with the sliding distance. The evolution process is obviously affected by the structure of the wire rope. The friction coefficient decreases rapidly in the initial stage, and it is about 0.65 at relatively stable. The sliding wear scar of wire rope distributes along the rope strand, and gradually changes from irregular dispersion to complete and smooth. The maximum wear width of the wear scar shows a nonlinear cumulative growth trend in the wear evolution process. The wear features are furrow, spalling and plastic deformation. The wear mechanisms are mainly adhesive wear and abrasive wear. As the wear distance increases from 0 m to 280 m, the maximum breaking force of the wire rope decreases from approximately 49.6 kN to 42 kN. The maximum number of cycles of bending fatigue decreases nonlinearly from approximately 10 708 to 4 070. The tensile fracture of the damaged wires is irregular, and the plastic deformation is not obvious. The fracture mechanism of the wire rope under tensile load is ductile fracture. The bending fatigue fracture of the damaged wires is neat, and there are different cracks on the fracture surface. The fracture mechanism of the wire rope under bending fatigue load is brittle fracture.