Material ropeway

A material ropeway or ropeway conveyor[1] is a subtype of gondola lift, from which containers for goods rather than passenger cars are suspended.

View along the Forsby-Köping limestone cableway, Sweden

Etching of Adam Wybe's world's first cable car in Gdańsk. (by Willem Hondius)

Material ropeway in Nußloch, Germany

Material ropeways are typically found around large mining concerns, and can be of considerable length. The COMILOG Cableway, which ran from Moanda in Gabon to Mbinda in the Republic of the Congo, was over 75 km in length. The Norsjö aerial tramway in Sweden had a length of 96 kilometers.

The first recorded mechanical ropeway was by Croatian Fausto Veranzio who designed a bicable passenger ropeway in 1616. The world's first cable car on multiple supports was built by Adam Wybe in Gdańsk, Poland in 1644. It was powered by horses and used to move soil over the river to build defences.[2]

In Eritrea, the Italians built the Asmara-Massawa Cableway in 1936, which was 75 km long. The Manizales - Mariquita Cableway (1922) in Colombia was 73 km long.

Conveyors can be powered by a wide variety of forms of energy, such as electricity, engines, or gravity (particularly in mountainous mining concerns, or where running water is available).[3] Gravity-driven conveyors may qualify as zip-lines.