After the ferry service on Lake Constance was resumed after the war, the traffic was initially served by the three pre-war ferries Meersburg , Konstanz and Bodan . However, the rapidly growing volume of traffic required additional capacities in the early 1950s. Since the Bodan shipyard in Kressbronn am Bodensee , the shipyard for all other Lake Constance ferries , was busy with new ships in the post-war period, the Deggendorfer Werft und Eisenbau was commissioned to build the new ferry on April 14, 1951 . The hull was built under construction number 261 in Deggendorf , then dismantled again into segments and transported to Ludwigshafen on Lake Constance . There was a temporary Querslip built where the ferry was finally assembled and their on 5 April 1952 launch had.
After the interior was completed, the ferry was put into service on July 27, 1952. It was christened Linzgau and was the first of the “Gäu” ferries after the Bodan, which interrupted the tradition of naming the two port cities of the ferry. It was named after the Linzgau , a landscape on Lake Constance north of the Überlinger See , in which the city of Meersburg is also located. The two later "Gau" ferries, Hegau and Thurgau , were named after the other two Lake Constance landscapes , which together form the closer catchment area of the ferry line.
The Linzgau was the last Lake Constance ferry to be equipped with an on-board voltage of 110 volts and which used conventional propellers as a drive - the following ferries had 220 volts and Voith-Schneider drives .
The Linzgau had a comparatively shallow draft , which made it more susceptible to crosswinds than other ferries. Nevertheless, no special incidents or accidents are known from her 28 years of service. In 1980 it was retired and the new Meersburg was put into service as the successor. The Linzgau was anchored at the Konstanz ferry port for another 16 years , where it served as a club home for the Staad sailing club. In the summer of 1996 it was brought to Fußach and scrapped there.
