Danube-Vltava-Elbe Canal
The Danube-Moldau-Elbe Canal was a canal project that was supposed to connect the Elbe , Moldau and Danube rivers .
prehistory
The Linzer Steig , the route from Linz to the north, is a traditional trade route, including for salt from the Salzkammergut . Therefore there were plans very early on to increase the efficiency of this route. Emperor Charles IV, who resided in Prague, had the first plans for a waterway between the Danube and Vltava in 1374. In 1706, Emperor Josef I commissioned the hydraulic engineer Lothar Vogemont to carry out a feasibility study. Also under Maria Theresa , various canal projects such as that of Albert von Sterndahl from 1768 and the project of the director of the Vienna Navigation Office, Joseph Walcher , were examined by the "Navigation Building Directorate" founded especially for this purpose in Prague , but rejected due to the exorbitantly high costs.
Commissioned by the Bohemian Hydrotechnical Society in 1807, Franz Josef von Gerstner also traced a canal and relied largely on the project by Joseph Walcher. Detailed cost calculations then led to a railway project with a shortened route, after this new option was successfully pursued in England in 1801, with which the father and son of the Knights von Gerstner planned and built the Budweis – Linz – Gmunden horse-drawn railway .
channel
While the Elbe is navigable beyond the confluence of the Vltava, the Vltava is only navigable as far as the Štěchovice hydropower plant around 20 km south of Prague. The section between the Vltava and Danube, which is essential for the canal, never got beyond the planning stage. The plan was to channel the Vltava to Budweis , for the further course there were variants for the connection to the Danube from Linz to Vienna.
In the first fully elaborated project by the engineer J. Deutsch from 1878, the canal left the Vltava near Budweis and met the Danube near Korneuburg . The at least 2.1 m deep canal to Budweis would have been 222 km long and the part of the Vltava to be canalized to its mouth 462 km. 62 locks were planned on the Vltava and 55 locks in the section up to the apex. The apex was to be overcome at 551 m above sea level with a 76 km long fairway from Gmünd to Allentsteig and then led to Korneuburg with 130 locks. Several other projects took up this plan and refined it in sections, but without fundamentally adding anything new.
The competitiveness with the existing railway line was essential. The ship freights, which mainly consist of raw materials, should make up for the speed advantage of the railways in terms of the amount to be transported. Interestingly, the focus was not on the project's construction costs, but only on ongoing operations.
The Böhmische Maschinenfabriken in Schönbach worked out plans for the lifting works, which were later modified so that the lifting and transportation of the ships should no longer be floating, but dry.
The canal was only used as a Vltava Canal in the area of the Vltava River, which flows into the Elbe .
literature
- Carl Victor Suppán : Waterways and Inland Shipping , Verlag A. Troschel, Berlin, 1902
- Jan Kaftan : Current status of the Danube-Moldau-Elbe Canal project. In: Association publications of the German-Austrian-Hungarian. Association for Inland Shipping, No. 12, 1897
- Jan Kaftan: The Vienna-Korneuburg-Budweis waterway , 1903
- Christian Petrlík: The Danube-Moldau-Elbe-Canal , publishing house of the Danube-Moldau-Elbe-Kanals-Comités, 1893
- Heinrich Schlesinger: The economic importance of the Danube-Moldau-Canales published by the Donau-Moldau-Elbe-Canal-Comité, 1902
- Stephan Brabec: The canalization of the Vltava and Elbe at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Diploma thesis, University of Vienna, 2010 ( online )
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.schmalspur-europa.at/schmalsp_41.htm
- ↑ Carl Victor Suppan: waterways and inland waterways , p 556