Workers cut a banana stalk from the tree and hang it on one of the monorail's hooks. Thus, each stalk goes from tree to train and never touches the ground to insure bruise free bananas. The monorail tracks are light and can be moved to the area where the bananas are being picked each day. Small engines, with an engineer aboard, pull trains of banana stalks from the fields into the stripping shed. In the shed, the train is broken down to the individual stalks and is rolled, still hanging from overhead tracks, to the cutters.
Workers load the stripped stalks into small trucks to be used for mulch.
The bunches go into a washing vat to disinfect them and to allow a long line of sorters to trim and reject those with blemished or flawed skins. Most bunches are 6 to 12 bananas and of uniform size and complexion. An elevated conveyor belt carries the rejected bunches to large trucks for eventual shipment to local markets, El Salvador and Mexico. A worker weighs a collection of bunches, enough to fill the box arriving on an overhead conveyor, places them inside the pre-installed protective plastic bag and sticks on the familiar company labels. Those full boxes travel on roller tracks into the waiting box cars of the narrow gauge railroad that will take the bananas to the port town of Santo Tom s on the Caribbean.