Coaster

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Modern kitchen in a shipyard

A coaster , or Kümo for short , is a motorized, smaller cargo ship for use in coastal waters and on navigable rivers for the transport of containers , general cargo and bulk cargo .

Application area

Coasters are ocean-going vessels and their area of ​​application is coastal shipping . The term Kümo does not include tankers in coastal shipping, regardless of the comparable size and otherwise similar use. The definition of what coastal shipping actually is has expanded over the last 100 years to the same extent as, on the one hand, the size of the ships used has steadily increased and, on the other hand, the area of ​​operation has been more and more European since the 1960s left and became part of the world's maritime shipping. In the Anglo-Saxon region, a distinction is made between the short sea trade , shipping over shorter distances, and deep sea trade , e.g. shipping across entire oceans.

history

Development up to the Second World War

Advertisement for aftermarket engines from 1913

European coastal shipping was operated with a large number of specialized sailing vehicles until the first decades of the last century. It mainly concentrated on cabotage , i.e. transport within a country, but also carried out part of the coastal transport between the countries. Until the second half of the 19th century, coastal cargo ships were built almost exclusively from wood . Later, at first at British colliers , iron and soon also steel were used, with composite structures made of iron or steel with a floor made of wood for a long time in coastal voyages, especially the wadden voyages .

The triumphant advance of the steamships changed the composition of the ships used in coastal travel only slightly, since the capital and personnel-intensive operation of steam engines in this segment of maritime transport did not pay off. The picture only changed with the appearance of the compact and reliable glow-head motor . In the first two decades of the 20th century, larger numbers of coastal sailors with simply constructed and relatively economical diesel engines began to be converted into motor sailers . The engines were initially used as an auxiliary drive, but quickly established themselves as the main drive, increasingly replacing the sails of coastal freighters.

Development until today

Paper roll cover on a Kümo in the port of Hallstavik
Kümo Kühlungsborn , 1957
Feeder ship Jork Reliance on the Elbe

The importance of coasters grew in Germany from 1948 onwards. After the end of the Second World War , all German ships still in existence at the time had to be delivered to the Allies or placed under their control. The construction of new ships was completely forbidden until 1948. From 1947/48 coasters could again be built up to a length between the perpendiculars of 33.49 m (110 feet). The Hamburg shipbuilder Adolf Weselmann delivered a basic design within a competition, according to which 71 ships were built, which is why these ships were also called Weselmänner or Volkswagen der Kümos . A more factually known name was small coaster to distinguish it from the later built larger Kümos. The first strict restrictions imposed by the Allies were only met by the Paul delivered on November 28, 1949 by the W. Holst shipyard . The conditions were gradually lifted until 1951. The Kümos of this first post-war period mostly had a measurement of around 299  gross register tons (GRT) with a load capacity of 400 to 650 tons.

From the mid-1950s, due to the increasing need for transport, Kümos began to be built with a measurement of up to 499 GRT and a load capacity of up to 900 tons. The carrying capacity of these units, also known as medium-sized coasters , could be increased further in the early 1960s by changing the measurement from full-decker to protective-decker. With the construction of the 499s, for example, a number of shipyards began to implement the possibilities offered by the surveying rules in such a way that the new Kümone buildings quickly increased in size with the given surveying. One soon spoke of so-called "paragraph ships". The Bell Vanguard , built in 1966, was also one of the 499s. She was the first German container ship and led the development of coastal vessels to feeder ship one.

In the 1970s, the ships developed into large coaster with 1599 GRT and carrying capacities between 3000 and 6000 tonnes via the even larger 999 series, i.e. Kümos with up to 999 gross register tons and up to 3000 tons, built since the early 1970s .

By the end of the 1980s, the carrying capacity of the largest ships used in typical coastal shipping services had risen above the 10,000 t mark. This trend has continued unabated to this day, as can be seen, for example, from the fact that ship types such as the Baltic Max Feeder have load capacities between 17,000 and 18,000 tons.

In the interchangeable sea / inland traffic, modern Kümos now operate regular traffic (i.e. according to a schedule) from the individual sea ports via the inland waterway to the inland ports. The feeder ships, which are used as feeders and distributors for the large container terminals in the deep-water sea ports, are of great importance in the sea ports. As early as 1992, two thirds of the German coastal shipping fleet were container ships.

VdK statistics of the number of ships, ship size and carrying capacity (1960 to 1990)

The average size of German coastal ships has grown rapidly since the 1950s. While at the beginning of 1960 around 15% of the coastal vessels in the Association of German Coastal Ship Owners had a measurement of less than 100 GRT, this number had shrunk to 1.1% at the beginning of 1977, i.e. practically disappeared from the market. The share of ships over 500 GRT rose from 0.3% to 16.1% in the same period. In the period from 1970 to 1977 alone, the size of the ship increased by 50%.

At the beginning of 1960 there were only two ships (0.2%) with a dead weight over 1000 tons; ten years later that number had grown to 167. At the beginning of 1977 it was 269, with the largest units having a load capacity of around 4500  tdw .

Another development was seen in the number of ships. Between 1948 and 1970 the number of coastal ships in the Association of German Coastal Ship Owners ranged from 936 to 1,061, with the highest number being reached in 1970. After 1970, the number of ships fell to 610 by 1977, but the dead weight of the fleet only fell from 651,715 tons to 641,737 tons during this period (average lifting capacity in 1970: 614 tons, 1977: 1052 tons), so it remained almost at the same level. In the next ten years or so, the number of ships in the association's fleet remained more or less constant. In 1986 the number of ships increased slightly to 654 units, the deadweight in the same period increased by over a million tons to 1,670,757 tons (average deadweight in 1986: 2,555 tons).

The shipping crisis in the mid-1980s slowed this development again. In 1990 there were 423 ships with 1,285,529 tons (average load capacity 1986: 3039 tons) in the association fleet. However, this reduced number must also be seen against the background of a number of crisis-related withdrawals from the Association of German Coastal Ship Owners.

literature

  • Gert Uwe Detlefsen : From the ewer to the container ship . The development of the German coasters. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford 1983, ISBN 3-7822-0321-6 .
  • A. Boerma: Coasters . De laatste 50 Jaar van de KHV. Uitgevereij De Alk, Alkmaar 1992, ISBN 90-6013-998-4 .
  • Chris Cheetham, Max Heinimann: Modern River Sea Traders . Modern River Sea Traders, Teignmouth 1996, ISBN 0-9516317-2-1 .
  • A. Weselmann: Review of the development of coasters from 200 to 1000 GRT . In: Yearbook of the Shipbuilding Society . tape 57 , no. 1963 , 1964, pp. 99-103 .
  • Hans Jürgen Stöcker: Ready for the future - German coastal shipping at the beginning of the 90s . In: Nauticus . tape 39 , 1991, pp. 136-155 .
  • Association of German Coastal Ship Owners: The German Coastal Shipping in the years 1975/76 . 1977, p. 14-25 .
  • Cai Boie: Shipbuilding in Germany 1945–52 . The forbidden industry. 1st edition. Verlag Gert Uwe Detlefsen, Bad Segeberg / Cuxhaven 1993, ISBN 3-928473-11-5 .
  • Frank Binder: Film about the last Kümos . In: Daily port report of September 11, 2013, p. 16

See also

Web links

Commons : Coasters  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adolf Weselmann: The new coasters . In: Hansa , number 39/40, September 1949, pp. 934-936
  2. ^ Association of German Shipowners (Ed.): Freight traffic over sea . Stern Verlag, Lüneburg 1993, ISBN 3-923603-00-2 , p. 48 .