Můstek (Hojsova Stráž)
A kilometre-long hook tow on wooden portal trestles, built by a works sports club in the early 1950s and the first lift in the Šumava to run on a diesel engine; it stopped after 1989 and the slope has closed over completely.
- Region
- Plzeň Region
- Country
- Czech Republic
- Status
- abandoned
- Year opened
- early 1950s
- Year closed
- 1989
- Reason for closure
- The lift ended after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when the works sports clubs that had built and run this kind of installation across Czechoslovakia lost their footing and their state-enterprise backing.
History
Můstek is a hill above Hojsova Stráž in the Šumava, near Železná Ruda in the Plzeň region, and the lift that served it was an unusually ambitious piece of early Czechoslovak ski engineering. TJ Škoda Plzeň, the sports club of the Škoda works, built a hook tow here in the early 1950s - roughly a kilometre long with 240 m of vertical, its haul rope carried on wooden portal trestles, and the first lift in the area driven by a diesel engine rather than an electric motor or a repurposed vehicle. It ran for some four decades and stopped after the revolution of 1989. A handful of steel supports are all that mark the line now; the piste on the Malý Hank slope has grown over entirely. A separate and much smaller operation, the roughly 300 m lift at Hojsova Stráž-Vyhlídka, still runs in the village below and should not be confused with it. The lift's manufacturer, its exact opening and closing years and any piste names are not recorded. The source here is Zapomenuté lyžařské vleky, a Czech documentation project set up to preserve the memory of abandoned ski lifts in Czechia and Slovakia - the closest equivalent in central Europe to the French and Swiss ghost-station archives used elsewhere in this dataset.
Lifts
| Name | Type | Manufacturer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unnamed lift | Surface lift | A hook tow of about 1 km with 240 m of vertical, built by TJ Škoda Plzeň in the early 1950s and the first in the area to be powered by a diesel engine; the haul rope ran on wooden portal trestles. Several steel supports still stand on the hillside |
Sources and further reading
Location
49.2113, 13.2439