Light railway of the Foça salt flats

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Light railway of the Foça salt flats
Decauville railway with tipping platforms
Decauville railway with tipping platforms
Gauge : 600 mm ( narrow gauge )
Salt works office and power station, 1910
Decauville line of the Çamaltı salt pan in Foçateyn, 1910
Electric conveyor belt, 1910
Manually building a pile of salt

The Feldbahn the salt mines of Foca was a narrow-gauge railway with a track width mm from 600 to 1,910 in the salt mines of Foca in today's Turkey was operated.

history

Alum was mined in the Foça area as early as 1300 . Around 1550, alum mining lost its importance compared to rock salt mining. The mining of rock salt increased exponentially in the 16th century and reached its peak at the end of the 19th century.

Sea salt has also been extracted there since ancient times. Windmills for pumping the brine in salt pans and four large salt warehouses at the port of Yeni Foça give an impression of the importance of salt production in this region.

The Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane (German, Ottoman State Debt Administration ) was founded in 1881 by the seven most important European powers after the Ottoman Empire stopped its debt payments in 1875 and declared state bankruptcy.

Due to the harsh working conditions and social changes, there were two large waves of strikes within ten years: the boatman's strike of 1898 and the workers' and managerial strikes from 1908 to 1909 showed that salt mining was due to labor-intensive production and transport methods and several intermediate managers ( Ottoman رئيس, rice (en) ) and was therefore expensive and dependent on personnel.

After the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 , salt mining was modernized in collaboration with an Italian engineer named Boso and salt transport was modernized in collaboration with a French businessman named Tiso: the government built a small power station to power the electric pumps that replaced the old windmills Pumping brine more efficiently. Electric conveyor belts and the Decauville Railway (Ottoman: Dekovil) were used around 1910 to move salt more cheaply. By reducing the workforce previously used for the transport, the costs fell significantly.

Nowadays the Çamaltı salt works is the largest salt works in Turkey and the second largest sea salt production plant in the world with an annual production capacity of 500,000 to 550,000 tons of salt.

  • Yeni Foça windmills

  • Two of the four salt warehouses in Eski Foça, around 1913

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Emre Erol: Capitalism, migration, war and nationalism in an Aegean port town: the rise and fall of a Belle Époque in the Ottoman county of Foçateyn. Published on September 9, 2014, Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/1887/28535 pages 70-72 and 85-89.
  2. ↑ Mehtap Kutlu, Burçin Mutlu, Gözde Aydoğan and Kıymet Güven: Salmonella mutagenicity analysis of water samples from Çamaltı saltern.
  3. ^ Emre Erol: The Ottoman Crisis in Western Anatolia: Turkey's Belle Epoque and the Transition to a Modern Nation State. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Page 59–62.