De Rijn

**De Rijn**
Ship data
flag	Prussia
other ship names	Friedrich Wilhelm; Prince Friedrich of Prussia; Prins Frederik;
Ship type	Smooth deck steamer
Shipyard	Hoogendijk, Capelle aan den IJssel
Launch	1825
Whereabouts	Wrecked in 1844
Ship dimensions and crew
length	45.72 m ( Lüa )
width	4.88 m
Draft	Max. 0.99 m
displacement	190 t
Machine system
machine	2-cylinder steam engine
Machine ; performance	60 hp (44 kW)

The De Rijn - renamed Friedrich Wilhelm on October 17, 1825 , Prince Friedrich of Prussia in 1829 and Prins Frederik in 1831 - was the fourth German steamship to provide regular service on the Rhine .

The pioneering journey

In September 1825, the paddle steamer De Rijn , which had only been completed a few weeks earlier at the shipyard of the Dutch engineer and shipbuilder Gerhard Moritz Roentgen (1795–1852) on Feijenoord near Rotterdam , was commissioned by the Dutch steamship company founded in the same year Mainz "Steamship Company of the Rhine and Main" and under Roentgen's command a test trip on the Rhine from Cologne upstream to Kehl and Strasbourg . On September 10, the ship sailed up the Rhine from Cologne. In Koblenz there had to be a "lap of honor" for the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. insert. On September 14th, the king and his family and entourage drove on the ship from Koblenz back to Cologne. Only then could the ascent be continued. The public interest in the trip was extraordinarily high, so that one had to anchor in the river in front of Mainz in order to "protect oneself as much as possible from the too large crowd of curious people". On September 19, Grand Duke Ludwig I of Baden also came on board. Kehl was reached on September 21. On the way back, a pleasure trip was set up near Mainz on September 24th, in which around a hundred "high-ranking people" took part, in particular merchants, members of the Central Rhine Shipping Commission from Mainz, members of the civil and military administrations, and members of the Chamber of Commerce. The harmony music of the Imperial and Royal Austrian garrison in Mainz played after dinner to dance. On September 28, the ship returned from Cologne to Rotterdam and then - renamed Friedrich Wilhelm in honor of the Prussian king on October 17, 1825 - in regular passenger and freight service between Antwerp , Rotterdam and Cologne.

Liner service

The ship was bought in 1829 by the "Preußisch-Rheinische Dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft" (PRDG) founded on June 11, 1826 in Cologne, which later became Cologne Düsseldorfer , and renamed Prince Friedrich of Prussia , since it has been a ship with the name Friedrich Wilhelm since 1827 at the PRDG. The ship began service on the Mainz – Cologne route in April 1829, which the Concordia had opened on May 1, 1827. The 200 km long journey from Mainz to Cologne took around ten hours, considerably less than with the stagecoach . The return trip upstream took more than twice as long with a total travel time of 22 hours and 10 minutes: on the first day it was from Cologne to Koblenz , on the second day from Koblenz to Mainz.

In 1831 the ship was sold back to the Nederlandsche Stoomboot Maatschappij and renamed Prins Frederik . It was scrapped in 1844.

literature

CE Heymann, "Concordia", first steamer of the Prussian-Rhenish Steamship Company in Cologne, 1826 (Contributions to Rhine Studies, Issue 6) Publisher Rhein-Museum Koblenz, 1930
Horst Zimmermann, From the history of the passenger shipping companies on the Rhine. (Contributions to Rhine Studies, Issue 31), published by Rhein-Museum Koblenz, 1979
Georg Fischbach: The ships of the KD (a detailed list on over 1000 pages with many historical and current photos of all ships of the KD from 1826 to 2005). Publisher: Self-published, available from KD Cologne.
Hans Rindt, The ships of the Cologne-Düsseldorfer then and now , publisher Gunter Dexheimer

Web links

Footnotes

↑ Alex W. Hinrichsen: "The first 35 years of passenger steam shipping", in Reiseleben , issue 12, 1986.

[1] Alex W. Hinrichsen: "The first 35 years of passenger steam shipping", in Reiseleben , issue 12, 1986.