The only one in Poland
"Wide Rock", "White Mud", "Whites" and, finally "Limestoneville". Those are the sort of town names we see around here, roughly translated into English - for your convenience. This white substance is currently the main branch of industry, supporting the whole local economy. Welcome to Wapienno.
The local supplies of limestone have already been exploited by local peasants for centuries. Large scale mining only started in the 19th century, when a certain Wilhelm Roloff struck a very large layer of limestone while digging a well. Since then, the region started booming and production kept increasing. Consequently, facilities producing quicklime and slaked lime started appearing.
With the socialist era came a new wave of developements. In 1957, out of nowhere, a huge sodium carbonate plant appears. The population of the previously small spa-town of Janikowo quintuples between 1945 and 1992 (it reached around 9 thousand citizens), a couple of years later Janikowo gets township privilages, and the new factory demands thousands of tonnes of limestone. But how to supply it? By road? Rail? Conveyor? All of those options have some downsides. So what to choose?
The designers chose a rather unorthodox approach - a cable car. It was launched in the year 1960 and is currently the only operating cargo cable car railway in the entire country, with others having been closed down between the 1980s and 2000s. It currently has a length of around 7 kilometers, though its length used to be around 15 kilometers, back when the cable cars served both the Janikowo soda plant and the Inowrocław-Mątwy soda plant. They conveniently lie in a straight line, so that the station, where the loads were separated between Janikowo and Mątwy only required a short stretch of additional cable. Its placement in a completely flat area seems rather weird, given that cable car railways are constructed almost exclusively in hilly terrain.
I sadly could not stumble upon any information about the designer and manufacturer of the cable car line (all internet articles copy the same data over and over again...), however to my untrained eye, it strongly resembles those we would see in former Czechoslovakia, where many such railways operate to this day. This thought doesn't have to be far out from reality, as I assume there would be no domestic designers of such equipement (with the small number of them here), and Czechoslovakia was always an expert in this regard. I have no information about the cable car technology in other countries of the Eastern Block, but it might aswell come from East Germany, or USSR? Who knows...
This post is the first of a small trilogy about Wapienno that I'm going to publish in the coming days. The region has many more small secrets to explore!
Photo by Piotrek/Toprus
The only one in Poland
"Wide Rock", "White Mud", "Whites" and, finally "Limestoneville". Those are the sort of town names we see around here, roughly translated into English - for your convenience. This white substance is currently the main branch of industry, supporting the whole local economy. Welcome to Wapienno.
The local supplies of limestone have already been exploited by local peasants for centuries. Large scale mining only started in the 19th century, when a certain Wilhelm Roloff struck a very large layer of limestone while digging a well. Since then, the region started booming and production kept increasing. Consequently, facilities producing quicklime and slaked lime started appearing.
With the socialist era came a new wave of developements. In 1957, out of nowhere, a huge sodium carbonate plant appears. The population of the previously small spa-town of Janikowo quintuples between 1945 and 1992 (it reached around 9 thousand citizens), a couple of years later Janikowo gets township privilages, and the new factory demands thousands of tonnes of limestone. But how to supply it? By road? Rail? Conveyor? All of those options have some downsides. So what to choose?
The designers chose a rather unorthodox approach - a cable car. It was launched in the year 1960 and is currently the only operating cargo cable car railway in the entire country, with others having been closed down between the 1980s and 2000s. It currently has a length of around 7 kilometers, though its length used to be around 15 kilometers, back when the cable cars served both the Janikowo soda plant and the Inowrocław-Mątwy soda plant. They conveniently lie in a straight line, so that the station, where the loads were separated between Janikowo and Mątwy only required a short stretch of additional cable. Its placement in a completely flat area seems rather weird, given that cable car railways are constructed almost exclusively in hilly terrain.
I sadly could not stumble upon any information about the designer and manufacturer of the cable car line (all internet articles copy the same data over and over again...), however to my untrained eye, it strongly resembles those we would see in former Czechoslovakia, where many such railways operate to this day. This thought doesn't have to be far out from reality, as I assume there would be no domestic designers of such equipement (with the small number of them here), and Czechoslovakia was always an expert in this regard. I have no information about the cable car technology in other countries of the Eastern Block, but it might aswell come from East Germany, or USSR? Who knows...
This post is the first of a small trilogy about Wapienno that I'm going to publish in the coming days. The region has many more small secrets to explore!
Photo by Piotrek/Toprus