Rhine Navigation

[Kaiser Kirk]

Rhine Navigation (1)

The introduction of steam has greatly increased the shipping on the Rhine; and small steamers ply also on the Main, the Neckar, the Maas and the Mosel.  The Rhine is navigable without interruption from Basel to its mouth, a distance of 550 miles.

The traffic at the chief German ports of the river aggregated 4,489,000 tons in 1870, but by 1900 this had grown to a total of 17,000,000 tons, thus distributed: Ruhrort, 6,512,000 tons; Duisburg, 3,000,000 tons; Cologne, 1,422,000 tons; and Mannheim, 6,021,000 tons. These are not the only ports on the river; a large trade is also done at Kehl, Maxau (for Karlsruhe), Ludwigshafen, Mainz, Bonn, Rotterdam and a host of smaller places.

The amount of traffic which passed the town of Emmerich near the Dutch frontier, both ways, increased from an annual average of about 6 million tons in 1881-85 to over 214 million tons in 1899.   London, Hamburg, Bremen and the chief Baltic ports as far as Riga and St Petersburg participate in the traffic on the Rhine.

The boats which ply up and down the river itself, without venturing upon the open sea, are mostly craft of 100 to 200 tons, owned in the great majority of cases by their captains, men principally of German or Dutch nationality. This fleet is computed to number some 8500 craft, with an aggregate capacity of over 2 million tons, of which about one-tenth are steamships.

Above Spires, however, the river craft are comparatively small, but lower down vessels of 500 and 600 tons burden find no difficulty in plying.

Improvements to river navigation have been focused between Strasbourg and Rotterdam. the low-water depths aimed at being 10 ft. from Rotterdam to the German frontier, and 10 ft. thence to Cologne; 8 ft. 3 in. from Cologne to St Goar, and 6 ft. 6 in. from St Goar to Mannheim.

Above Mannheim the depth of the stream is always less than 5 ft., and generally varies between that figure and 4 ft. 6 in. The difficulty of ascending the rapids near Bingen is usually surmounted by the help of steam hauling machinery placed on the bank, though powerful tugs have also come into use for this purpose.

Notwithstanding the inherent difficulties of construction caused by the great variations in the level of the stream, amounting sometimes to 20 ft. or more, the chief ports of the Rhine are admirably constructed, and well equipped with modern contrivances for loading and unloading vessels. Boats carrying as much as 600 tons are often able to proceed as far up stream as Strassburg, and smaller craft get as far as Huningen, a little above Basel.

The commerce carried on by the river itself is supplemented by the numerous railways, which skirt its banks and converge to its principal towns. Before the introduction of railways there were no permanent bridges across the Rhine below Basel; but now trains cross it at about a dozen different points in Germany and Holland


(1) Taken mainly from one early 1900s article I neglected to get bibliographic info for.