Neckar steamboat trip
The Neckar steamship service existed from 1841 to 1871 and linked Heilbronn and Mannheim by means of steam ships .
history
In 1817, Heilbronn first thought about steam shipping on the Neckar , after an English steamship had managed to sail to Cologne on the Rhine . The Heilbronn merchants wanted an economic connection to Mannheim, over 100 kilometers away by river . Steamships were considered to be the fastest means of transport at the time and their development progressed rapidly. The Neckar, which was not yet canalized at the time, with its dangerous shoals and currents, initially presented the designers with insoluble problems. The first attempts and model building by the Heilbronn merchant L. Bruckmann around 1820 were unsuccessful and were discontinued when Bruckmann moved away. In 1836 the topic was ready for debate again, since steamships that seemed suitable for the Neckar were now also available. In 1838 a city council commission was appointed. In 1839 a stock corporation was founded to finance the Neckar steam shipping, which issued 500 shares at 200 guilders , whereby the city of Heilbronn owned 10% of the shares.
The city of Heilbronn commissioned the first paddle steamer from the company Gache fils aimé in Nantes , whose ships seemed ideal for the conditions on the Neckar. The Heilbronn merchant Karl Christoph Reuß (* January 8, 1788, † August 22, 1847) had contacts with Loire shipping and initiated the order. The name of the type of ship, Inexplosible , refers to the ship's steam boiler, which is supposedly protected from explosions , as in the early days of steam propulsion technology accidents often occurred due to exploding boilers. The ship left the shipyard in Nantes as the 24th ship from their production and made the first part of its voyage dismantled into three parts. The ship was assembled in Strasbourg and from there drove down the Rhine on its own and from Mannheim up the Neckar to its destination in Heilbronn, where it arrived on December 7, 1841. The Heilbronnern called the ship Wilhelm . Two more ships from Nantes followed later: Leopold and Ludwig .
When it was founded in 1842, the revolutionary Heilbronner Zeitung Neckar-Dampfschiff named itself after the most modern means of transport in Heilbronn at the time.
Already in 1842 24,000 passengers were carried, in 1852 more than 50,000. In particular, the opening of the northern railway from Stuttgart to Heilbronn in July 1848 brought numerous passengers to the steamboats on the Neckar, as it was now possible to travel by train and ship from the Württemberg state capital to Mannheim and further down the Rhine. The timetables of the trains to and from Heilbronn were coordinated with the travel times of the Neckar ships. As a result, two more, larger Heilbronn Neckar steam ships of the Esslingen machine factory were put into operation in 1850 : City of Heilbronn and City of Heidelberg .
A significant proportion of the passengers were emigrants ; In 1854 and 1855 it is said to have been 8,000 and 9,000 respectively. With the opening of the Westbahn in 1853, which established a direct and unrivaled fast railway connection from Stuttgart to Mannheim, the number of passengers dropped drastically. Ultimately, steam shipping had to be nationalized in 1858 after only 11,800 passengers had been carried. In future, the Neckard steamers were almost exclusively used for pleasure trips, as travelers in a hurry preferred the much faster train. The steamboat lines from Sontheim to Heilbronn and from Heilbronn to Mannheim existed until 1869 and 1871, respectively, after the western fork railway in 1869 also arranged a direct rail connection from Heilbronn to Mannheim.
After that, the river was used for the tow barges of the Neckar-Ketten-Schleppschifffahrt .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Moriz von Rauch, p. 119.
- ↑ Joachim Hennze: How the Württemberg Northern Railway reached Heilbronn. The former junction is now in the shadow of the railway . In: Energy - New powers for Heilbronn . City Museums Heilbronn, Heilbronn 1997, ISBN 3-930811-65-0 , p. 43-50 .
literature
- Moriz von Rauch : Heinrich Titot . In: Report of the Historisches Verein Heilbronn Vol. 16. 1925/28 (1929).
- Willy Zimmermann: Heilbronn and its Neckar in the course of history . In: Historischer Verein Heilbronn , 24th publication 1954, Heilbronn 1954, pp. 5-52.
- Joachim Hennze : "The steamboat cast its anchor off Heilbronn to the cheering of thousands". The connection of the Neckar to world water traffic . In: Energy - New powers for Heilbronn . City Museums Heilbronn, Heilbronn 1997, ISBN 3-930811-65-0 , p. 7-18 .