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When, after the First World War, the S.A.I.M.T. company (Società Anonima Imprese Minerarie Trentine) took over the Schneeberg mine, attention was mainly paid to improving and rationalizing ore transport. Between 1924 and 1926, the company built a cable-car system, based essentially on experience gained during the Great War on the front in the Dolomites.
This cableway ran from St. Martin am Schneeberg in the Lazzacher Tal and crossed the Schneebergscharte, at an altitude of 2,700 m. Opposite the Poschhaus, along the mountain slope, a diversion led to the enrichment plant at Maiern.
The original plan involved continuation as far as the railway station of Sterzing, but only the stretch from Maiern to Mareit was completed, where the buckets emptied their contents into the depot which already existed at the foot of the Mareit track (near the present-day football field).
Later, a station lower down was built, with a very large depot for ore, opposite the Wolfsthurn Castle at Mareit.
Initially, transport to Sterzing was still carried out using carts, and after the Second World War by truck. The building of the road to the bottom of the valley behind Maiern was completed in 1965. From then onwards, trucks loaded their lead and zinc concentrate at Maiern and took it directly to foundries in northern Italy and abroad. The relative cableway route was demolished. Its passage through the middle of the Val Ridnaun across the passes of St. Laurentius and S. Magdalena remained visible for many years as a wide brown strip, since the soil had been impregnated for so long with bits of lead concentrate which fell from the buckets. Today, you can still clearly see the track through the wood near the church of S. Magdalena.
Ore transport was far quicker by the cableway. A bucket only took 70 minutes to travel from St.Martin to Maiern, whereas an ore-truck running along a rail had previously taken at least 3 hours, and a mule about 6 hours, to travel the same distance.
In addition, with the cableway, for the first time ore could be transported from Schneeberg throughout the year, although during the winter storms, abundant snowfalls and avalanches did cause interruptions, and both men and materials suffered.
In 1985, the cable-car system, this marvel of technology, was demolished as far as the last stretch to Maiern, together with the loading station at Schneeberg. Benedikt Hochrainer (born in 1926) of Ridnaun, worked in the mine from 1951 to 1982, mainly as cable-car foreman. One of his most vivid memories is of the severe winter of 1951, when the snow was so deep that the buckets were blocked by it:
‘In February 1951, about 30 miners had to dig a trench several metres deep underneath the cableway in the Lazzacher Tal. I was with Stefan Markart, digging near pylon 20, when we were warned to get away from it, because they wanted to send down some buckets. At that same moment, we suddenly saw the buckets racing down towards the valley and realized that the cable had broken. From the pylon above our heads, the buckets fell off their cables and crashed down into the deep snow underneath like bombs. The broken cable was twisting and turning across the snow as if possessed by the devil, it was terribly dangerous. After several desperate attempts, we managed to get out of our trench, about four metres deep, and gain safety behind some trees. St. Barbara must have been protecting us.’