Page 94 - Bulletin 17 2013

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The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway, 1926-29

During the pre-war years the Council had had a fixation with the surface railway system and

the Swiss experience with it. Aerial ropeways had not been accorded serious consideration
for passenger transport although increasing use was being made of them overseas and they

had been proven in practice locally. However, history shows the 1894 article (in the B & SA
Export Gazette) to have been prescient in its speculations about the application of Thomas

Stewart’s wire ropeway “for the transport of passengers about the rocky heights surrounding

the city”. The Spilhaus / Bleichert aerial cableway proposal of 1911, too, was the harbinger of
the eventual and only scheme to be built.

Indications that plans for an aerial cableway might be afoot were contained in a sequence of
four articles that appeared in the Cape Times between 11 - 16 January 1926. The first three

recounted the details of the failed Peter scheme of 1912-14, compared the rack and funicular
options and suggested a third mode of ascending the mountain: a motor road from Constantia

Nek to the Table, given the relatively easy gradients. The writer observed: “Table Mountain
may be compared to a wedge lying on its side; it is very precipitous at the front but much less

so at the back.” The final article posed a fourth alternative, the aerial ropeway system, and

described an interview with its promoter, Norwegian-born consulting engineer Mr Trygve
Strömsöe, in his office on the top floor of the Board of Executors Building, Wale Street. Here

he demonstrated a small working model while making reference to the mountain viewed from
his window. He referred to the pioneering work of German engineer, Veldmann, who around

1902 began promoting aerial ropeways in Europe as ‘tourist railways’. Since then many had
been constructed in Austria, Switzerland and Italy, and also at Rio de Janeiro to connect the

city to the Sugar Loaf.

Strömsöe had arrived in South Africa in 1904 and had spent much of his working life

constructing concrete bridges. He settled in Cape Town in 1925 and began investigating the

aerial ropeway idea, carried out his own investigations into its feasibility on Table Mountain,
and demonstrated it to entrepreneur Sir Alfred Hennessy at his home. He did this by means of

his working model that he set up between Hennessy’s roll-top desk (upper station) and the
floor (lower station). Hennessy was enthusiastic and drew in some influential associates in

the persons of Sir David Graaff (instigator of the Adderley Street Pier in 1890), and financier
Sir Ernest Oppenheimer. The three of them, plus Strömsöe, eventually formed the first Board