Dave also asked about how the lines combined at Zaga station. I don't
know, but I'll make a guess based on my observing a ski lift or two and
a couple of amusement park rides. I believe there was a long flat
piece similar to the tower that Tom Johnson and his friend are standing
on only going down hill in each direction of travel. As the wheels traveled
on the wire to support the weight, when the gondola arrived on a transfer
station, the pulling wire would disengage and allow the gondola to go forward
on gravity. After transferring to the new line or reaching the new
pulling wire, the wire would re-engage and off the gondola would go.
This is not necessarily the method, but I believe it would work.
Loading and unloading could have been done in one of at least one of
two ways. In the first, the extra 120 cars would be passed onto a
side track and loaded or unloaded as the case would be. In the other
case, the load was dumped into the bucket at one end and dumped out of
the bucked at the other.
The British may have been more pragmatic than being punative to
the Eritreans and Italians in this case. They thought that the line
was highly susceptible to theft and sabotage. I was reminded of the
former by Don Tipton when he told me that during operation the Eritreans
would jump on a gondola at a tower and throw things of value off of them.
He also reminded me that the baboons would ride on the rigs. Presumably,
they would consume any food they found. The Ethiopian administration
may have believed the same way. However, several Eritrean expatriates
have told me that the railway was dismantled to spite the Eritreans for
wanting independence. The same may have been the case with the Ropeway.
The timing of the latter becomes suspicious when one considers that the
first stages of the Eritrean Revolution were starting shortly before the
dismantling began.
