On the long rope:

the electric hoisting machine raised and lowered the pit cages.

Electric floor conveyer machine

Directly in front of your location, five metres away, stood the wall of the machine house. Behind it, in the room separated from the rest of the shaft hall, was the hoisting machine.

The hoisting machine used here was a ‘floor conveyor machine’ because it was built at ground level. The two hoisting ropes ran from the machine's hoisting drums up through the partition wall into the main room of the shaft hall and on through the roof to the top of the pit head frame. They ran vertically downwards over the two pulleys to the hoisting frames. The two inclined support struts on the headframe absorbed the considerable lateral tensile forces of the hoisting cables.

The hoisting hooks on which the two hoisting frames were suspended were attached to the hoisting cables.

The conveying speed was specified as three metres per second (for comparison: a standard passenger lift travels at a speed of one metre per second). Consequently, the journey from the shaft hall to the main filling point underground took around 40 seconds. The hoisting cables had a diameter of 38 mm and had to be able to carry a weight of up to ten tonnes.

Manual control during rack transport

Work was carried out in the mine all year round, even on Sundays and public holidays. Mining operations continued around the clock in three shifts.

At each shift change, a phase of rack transport began. The ‘rope transport’ with the miners took place first, followed by the ‘product transport’.

The operators at the main filling points, above ground and underground, used short, Morse code-like electric bell signals to tell the machine operator at the hoisting machine what he had to do.

For example: one ring = stop, two rings = start, three rings = speak (via an intercom system). If the fully automatic conveying was not possible due to maintenance work or malfunctions, the ore could be conveyed to the surface in manually controlled product conveyors in mine wagons.

Fully automatic control during container conveying.

The hoisting machine moved a hoisting frame with the empty skip exactly in front of the ‘main filling point underground in the rhythm of the hoisting cycle. It was filled with ore from the corresponding right or left measuring bag via gap bridges.

Then the winding machine pulled the winding frame back above ground to just below the roof of the shaft hall. There, the lower sliding gate on the back of the skip opened and the ore slid through a hopper onto an inclined conveyor belt.

In the opposite direction, the other conveyor frame went through the reverse process.

The machine operator and the loaders only had a supervisory function when conveying the skip.