WHEN you’re stuck in a traffic jam or waiting for a rail replacement bus Monday morning, spare a thought for these workers in a small mining town in Georgia who have to travel to work in 62-year-old rusted cable cars.

    Miners in the former Soviet town of Chiatura face a death-defying commute every day as they take the cable cars up a huge gorge.

    Built in the 1950s by the Soviet Union to transport workers around the mining town more quickly, the cable cars are still in place and serve as a means of transport to workers and tourists.

    Dubbed the “rope road,” the cable car network was built as a way to efficiently transport workers to and from the mines during the height of production in the 1950s — and was needed due to the town’s rugged landscape.

    The town was once the manganese mining capital of the world and was considered vital to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

    But the fall of the USSR brought an abrupt end to most industry in the area, leaving the cable car network as a relic of a bygone era.

    The town’s manganese deposits were discovered at the turn of the 20th century but for decades workers had to climb up and down the steep gorge every day as they made their way to and from work.

    In an effort to conquer the town’s extreme geography, the network of tramways were built so almost every corner of the mining town was accessible.

    The system transported the town’s 4,000 workers from their homes at the bottom of the gorge to the mines that dotted the mountains. It was also used to transport the manganese to the various factories in the area.

    Photographer Ioanna Sakellaraki traveled to Chiatura and took these jaw-dropping pictures of the cable car network, which still boasts 17 functioning cabins and car lines that span more than 3.7 miles (5.9 km).

    “The mining town of Chiatura, with its post-Soviet identity, had always been one of the must-visit destinations on the top of my list, mostly due to its interesting historical and political background dating back to the late 1950s and the Stalin era,” Sakellaraki, 26, said.(SD-Agencies)