The original Aeron Express was a piece of practical Victorian engineering. A flood in the mid-1880s carried away the road bridge that crossed the River Aeron at the harbour mouth, separating the two halves of the town for everyday foot traffic. The labourers needed to cross. Captain John Evans, a local master mariner, built a hand-powered aerial cable car on the principle of the flying fox - a single carriage suspended from one taut cable, hauled across by a separate looped drive rope. The first version carried one person. Demand was high enough that Evans enlarged the carriage to seat two, then four or more. It worked well into the twentieth century, until a footbridge was finally rebuilt and replaced it. By that time, a generation of Aberaeron had grown up using it as a daily commute.

In 1987, Councillor Bob Griffin, the then-owner of the Aberystwyth Cliff Railway and a former Mayor of Aberystwyth, decided to bring the Aeron Express back. He intended it primarily as a tourist attraction. The new version ran from the Easter bank holiday weekend each year until the end of September - the traditional Aberaeron summer season - and was packed away for the winter, the carriage and cable stored in the nearby village of Llanon, hexagonal wooden ticket huts dismantled and stacked. The mechanism was deliberately authentic. A single steel cable carried the weight; a looped drive cable, wound by hand on wheels mounted at each quay, pulled the carriage across. At busy times two operators worked together, one on each side. Most of the time, one operator did the whole thing alone. Maximum load was four adult men, the limit being not the cable but the strength of the person on the crank.

Visitors made every kind of assumption. Many were convinced the carriage was actually driven by a concealed electric motor, refusing to believe a grown adult could hand-crank a four-passenger cable car across a harbour. Others asked where the ferry went, as though the obvious destination - the opposite quay, fifty feet away - could not possibly be all there was. The genuine operational problem was different. When the main cable was tensioned, it stretched too low across the harbour mouth to allow boats with high masts in or out of the inner harbour. Whenever a yacht needed to come or go, the entire system had to be slackened and lowered. Aberaeron is a half-tide harbour and sailing traffic does not wait politely. The Aeron Express paused itself for every passing mast.

By the end of summer 1994, health and safety regulations had caught up with the machine. Hand-cranked aerial cable cars carrying paying passengers were now subject to a regulatory framework written for industrial cable systems. The Aeron Express did not meet it. The carriage came down. The structures were dismantled for what was supposed to be the winter and never went back up. The carriage made one more public appearance, paraded as a float at the 2007 Aberaeron Carnival, but it has not been seen since. In 1993, Sian Lloyd had presented a HTV programme that featured the ferry in operation, and the footage was reused in a Stories from the Street programme around 2003, by which time it was already a memory. The reinforced concrete footings remain on both quays, weathered and barnacled. In any given month, someone in Aberaeron will be talking about bringing the Express back. So far, no one has.