West Germany: Barging Ahead

Ever since the days of the Roman Empire, Europe has depended heavily on inland waterways as vital arteries for its economic lifeblood. West Germany’s arteries pump the hardest. Along the country’s 2,789 miles of navigable rivers and canals last year flowed 184 million tons of goods and raw materials, 27% of the country’s total freight traffic. Germany’s 7,600 barges carry more total tonnage than those of any other European country (though the neighboring Netherlands transports 66% of its internal commerce by water). This week in Hannover, Federal Transport Minister Hans-Christoph Seebohm will sign an agreement that calls for the greatest single development of Germany’s waterways since World War II: a $750 million, 20-year expansion and modernization program to be financed two-thirds by the federal government, one-third by the states.

Oldest & Cheapest. During World War II, Allied bombing clogged the waterways with 4,000 sunken vessels, 370,000 tons of twisted bridge steel, 14 million cubic feet of concrete and rubble. Since the war, Germany has spent more than $1 billion to clear away the debris, rebuild the fleet, deepen the rivers and improve the country’s 65 inland ports. Reason for continued reliance on the Continent’s oldest form of transportation: it is still the cheapest way to ship bulk freight. To move a metric ton of coal from Duisburg to Mannheim, for example, costs $1.87 by water, $4.87 by rail.

The key element in the vast new program is the construction of a $190 million, 70-mile-long North-South Canal that will link Hamburg to the Mittelland Canal, itself to be deepened and widened at a cost of $420 million. The new canal, running parallel to the River Elbe, will give the North Sea port direct access to the Ruhr industrial complex, is expected to generate an extra 10 million tons of freight annually after it is completed in 1972 The plan also calls for deepening and improving five other major canals.

Growing Pains. Though inland shippers carried 9.8% more cargo last year than the year before, they are facing some unpleasant growing pains. Wage costs have doubled in the last 15 years while rates have actually fallen because of competition, especially from pipelines (oil accounts for 16% of Germany’s total waterborne tonnage). Traffic is so heavy that barges frequently stack up in jams several miles long behind such bottlenecks as the locks on the Wesel-Datteln Canal, thus delaying the delivery of goods.

Some experts predict that Germany’s inland waterways will gradually lose ground to trucking and pipelines. Shipping Expert Walter Marquardt, deputy head of the Transport Ministry’s inland shipping section, questions the gloomy forecasts, noting that “traffic predictions have almost always proved too low.” Even if inland shipping’s share of commerce fails to grow proportionately, says Marquardt, it is still bound to increase in absolute terms as growing factories—in Germany and elsewhere—require ever greater amounts of the ores and bulk raw materials that the slow-chugging barges still carry so economically.