As Waltz and Morley talked, vehicles of all sizes moved in and out of Dar es Salaam city's First State-Owned Cable Factory. At this time, most of the vehicles were still human- or animal-powered, and each trip carried little cargo.
Fortunately, Dar es Salaam city railway station was not far from the First State-Owned Cable Factory, making both deliveries and shipments easy. The real difficulty lay in the sources of raw materials.
The First State-Owned Cable Factory obtained its copper and rubber from the interior, chiefly from Hohenzollern Province, Swabian Province, and Hesse Province. As for coal, it merely needed to obtain an allocation from the city.
Hohenzollern Province and Swabian Province both had railways, but Hesse Province was very different. It too lay west of the Mitumba Mountains, on the eastern edge of the Congo Basin, where the terrain dropped sharply and transportation was far from convenient.
Thus, as East Africa's main rubber-producing region, Hesse Province found it highly inconvenient to transport rubber after harvesting. Hesse Province was also a major resource province in East Africa, with extensive mineral deposits such as copper, coal, iron, and tungsten. At the same time, it was one of East Africa's most important forestry provinces, backed by the Congo rainforest and the Mitumba Mountains, with exceptionally abundant forest resources.
At present, few resource provinces could firmly surpass Hesse Province. They were Hechingen Province (the former Republic of the Transvaal), Matabele Province (Zimbabwe), Southern Frontier Province (the southern Republic of the Transvaal and the former Zulu Kingdom and Kingdom of Eswatini), Nile Province (South Sudan), New Baden Province (Botswana), Hohenzollern Province (Zambia), and Swabian Province (the southern Congo plateau).
Among them, Hechingen Province and Matabele Province stood alone in a league of their own. Their mineral resources could rival those of most countries in