The airborne manure heap

At the beginning of the 20th century, new vineyards were planted on the slopes at Grünhaus, requiring regular fertilisation with horse manure. To speed up transport of the manure from the stables on the shores of the Ruwer to the top of the Abtsberg, a company from Saarbrucken built a manure cable car – then a revolutionary step in agriculture.

The new technology worked without a hitch, until the day an unlucky labourer filled one of the cable cars with so much manure that one of the pylons collapsed, and the steel cable lost tension. At the same moment, the Trier train pulled into the Grünhaus station, whereupon the low-hanging cable sheared off all the locomotive’s funnels and the driver’s cabin. As a result, the imperial railway authority insisted that the transport of manure by cable car be suspended and the entire structure immediately dismantled.