The Otavi Mining and Railway Company (Otavi Minen- und Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft or OMEG) was a railway and mining company in German South-West Africa (today's Namibia). It was founded on 6 April 1900 in Berlin with the Disconto-Gesellschaft and the South West Africa Company as major shareholders.
OMEG built the longest 600 mm (1 ft 11 5⁄8 in) gauge railway in the world extending 567 kilometres (352 mi) from Swakopmund on the Atlantic coast to the mines of Tsumeb. Construction began in 1903 and reached Tsumeb three years later. The first 225 kilometres (140 mi) of railway required 110 steel bridges to cross deeply eroded gullies through sparsely vegetated arid terrain. Most were deck plate girders. Construction coincided with the Herero and Namaqua Genocide. Delays resulted from labor shortages and military feldbahn operations. A 91-kilometer branch was completed in 1908 from Otavi to mines near Grootfontein.
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Famous quotes containing the words mining, railway and/or company:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)