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The deepest gallery of a mine was called the main gallery. Its task was to bring water out of the network of tunnels and shafts and to bring down fresh air for ventilation. If a new ore deposit was excavated from a main gallery, the economic incentive increased.
In mines like those of Schneeberg, where single galleries were already shared out among various owners, the main galleries were subject to a complicated system of regulations, regarding the participation of each owner in their advance and maintenance. As at Schneeberg the deposits were excavated, chronologically speaking, from the top downwards, there were various degrees of work going on in the various main galleries. The original one was behind the miners’ lodgings, in the village near Schneebergbach, at an altitude of 2,310 m.
Already in the early 16th century, the galleries called St. Paul, at 2,250 m, and St. Peter, their shafts behind the buildings of the future crushing-mill and the Seemoos turbine at 2,236 m, became main galleries, until the opening of the Karl gallery.
Already around the year 1600, starting from Seemoos (a marsh), deep ore seams under the St. Peter main gallery were already being exploited, and extracting the ore became much more difficult and expensive. Percolating waters could not flow out because of the nature of the terrain, but had to be laboriously collected and raised in buckets up to the light of day.
In narrow shafts, the simplest solution was to use water-lifting equipment consisting of ladders placed one on top of each other, from which buckets of water were passed upwards. Later, primitive pumping equipment, in wood and metal, was tentatively applied, but it had to be worked by hand. One courageous attempt was made by the organ builder Daniel Herz of Munich, who offered a pumping plant, made of tin, to save manpower. But the poor resistance of the metal meant that the equipment did not even manage to last through its first expensive demonstration held at Schneeberg.
In the end, the workers had to be content with a simple pumping system manned by a maximum of 16 people per work-shift, which lifted about 23,400 litres of water for a maximum of 105 metres.

1600 - The Karl gallery
As a definitive long-term solution to the problem of removing water from tunnels lower than the St. Peter main gallery, already in 1624 a committee of seven technicians had recommended the excavation of a new main gallery above the Öß pasture, at an altitude of about 2,000 m, and had also indicated the most suitable spot where it should be begun. A later survey in 1629 also considered the possibility, thanks to the future main gallery, of discovering new veins of metal-bearing ore. In 1638, the mine manager Georg Geringer started a fifty-year-long period of building work, with an average advance of 17 toises (a unit of length) a year, but in spite of various surveys no conclusively good results were reached for a long time. The main reason was the difficulty in distributing proportionally and equitably the various quotas which each mine owner was required to pay for the high building costs, estimated at about 1000 florins a year. Another reason was that good end-results could only be expected on a very long-term basis. In 1646, an agreement was reached between the participating members, but the decisive impetus for actually implementing this centuries-long project was only given by an edict by the local prince Ferdinand Karl on June 30 1660. What with surveys and plan for financing the work, 36 years had passed when, on August 17 1660, at an altitude of 2,030 m, a symbolic excavation was finally made, celebrated by a solemn mass. The new gallery was called ‘Karl’, after the name of the prince and main builder Ferdinand Karl. The project foresaw six miners working in two shifts for a period of 34 years (27 toises per year) before the ore could be reached.
But already during the first year, the miners working on the advance fell way behind their schedule. The wearisome work through very hard layers of rock, full of small garnets and bodies of quartz, meant that the average daily advance was less than 2 cm.
Even after the introduction of blasting with ‘black powder’ after 1680, the scheduled working level was never reached.
There was also a catastrophic flood around the year 1700. Without knowing it, the miners released a subterranean outflow of water from the overlying Seemoos lake, which flooded the entire Karl gallery. It appears that about a dozen miners were drowned, their their relatives later being aided with modest pensions. For years, there was no thought of starting up work again in the Karl gallery, until the water was made to flow elsewhere, through a new and expensively constructed gallery excavated directly under the lake, and the crack in the Karl gallery was closed.
Instead of the 34 years calculated previously, no less than 90 years were actually required before the first vein of metalliferous ore was found in the Karl gallery, after about 1,400 m of sterile rock had been penetrated. But even then, its quality was not up to expectations. In 1756, the Karl gallery was connected with the network of other tunnels and overlying shafts. From then onwards, water was sent from Schneeberg through the Passeier side and the mine received better ventilation. The labours of Sisyphus, now almost unthinkable, of more than three generations of miners, were thus finally accomplished.
In 1903, work on amplifying the Karl gallery was begun. Almost 50 cm wide along its first 400 metres, and in parts only 170 cm high, the gallery was widened to more than 2 m on the left side and also made higher. Rails were laid down and a direct underground link with St. Martin, 320 m higher up, was established through the Pockleiten and Barbara galleries. The main aim of widening the main gallery in the early 20th century – that is, directly linking the Karl gallery with the Lazzacher Tal - was brought to a halt after more than a kilometre of advance by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This project, which aimed at replacing buckets of water, pulleys and sloping surfaces by proper elevating equipment, and the later cable-car system, was only completed in 1968 through the Poschhaus gallery, when mining activity was already declining.