Sinop Cable Car Station Becomes History

The 1930-kilometer cable car station belonging to the timber factory established by the Belgians in the Ayancık district of Sinop in 40 is history.

12 remained one of the 200 poles of the cable car station used to transport logging from the Chichal forests to the factory operated by the Belgians throughout the year. In the meantime, outside the cable car to carry the logistic by the Belgians on the rails laid in the mountains for years to make a voyage, and currently completed the life of the steam train is exhibited in front of the factory.

Kenan Ekin, retired from the factory, stated that the factory was established by the Germans and Belgians in 1930, and that the cable car poles and rail system, each 70 meters high, were destroyed by the flood disaster in 1963 in the district. Ekin said, “A Belgian woman found the steam-operated cable car system at that time and used it in the factory. In other words, the cable car system worked with steam just like the train. At that time, there were two steam engines on Çangal Mountain. These machines were powering the cable car. Heavy logs from a distance of 40 kilometers would come to the town center by this cable car, and after being processed here, they would go to Europe by sea. If that system had survived to the present day, it would have contributed greatly to the country's tourism.”

Ayancık is a town in Sinop Province, in the Western Black Sea Region of the Black Sea Region. Founded in the district center in 1929, the sawmill named Zingal TAŞ, one of Turkey's first foreign capital investments, is one of the oldest and most important industrial facilities of the forest industry in our country. The company has built a wide variety of transportation facilities in Ayancık, such as overhead lines, railways, highways, wet and dry gutters, pools, tramways for in-plant transportation, pier and loading crane, and many social facilities. With the developments that the company brought to the settlement, Ayancık turned into a European town in the 1930s.

This factory, which was established by the Zingal Company, was operated by foreign capital between 1926-1945, by the state between 1945-1996, and by the private sector after 1996. It is a facility successfully operated by foreign capital in our country. Although it worked profitably for many years after it was nationalized, it was privatized on the grounds of loss, but was closed by the private sector after an unsuccessful management. The factory, which has not been operated for years and was left to rot, was sold as scrap in 2011. Although the factory has disappeared, the remains of the transportation system spread throughout Ayancık, the social facilities and lodgings of the factory, and some of the facilities in the forest are still standing today. In this sense, Ayancık has an industrial heritage that can be seen rarely throughout the country.