Shipping, the historical edition.
Apr. 21st, 2014 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckOn Good Friday we made the trip down to the town of my father's childhood to visit family.
The weather turned out much better than expected and so we showed the kid some of the sights connected to the river.
The most famous one is the canal tunnel, the Weilburger Schifffahrtstunnel:
We saw a boy-girl double kayak team go through the lock, with the young woman operating the gates which meant a lot of physical work. I assume they took turns on the many locks on this stretch of the Lahn:
The tunnel itself is unique in Germany and it dates back to 1847. It is 195m long and its construction meant that a bend in the river could be circumnavigated to enable shipping on the Lahn up to Gießen (the German wikipedia article linked at the beginning of the post has nice graphics). Back when the tunnel was planned they had grand plans to eventually build a canal from the Lahn to the Elbe.
But things changed and ten years after it was finished the introduction of the railway to the Lahn valley meant that the tunnel lost its signifance.
Sight number two is much smaller in scale, but it also provided a useful service.
It's a small cable ferry which apparently dates back 300 years:
There are even bus stop like signs at both ends!
My father remembers this ferry from his youth, because he actually lived rather close by for some years.
So, even though we didn't need to cross the river, the kid had to be shown how the ferry works (and then they went back again!):
This is the ferryman:
(And then he had to go all the way back again to the other side, where his wife and a friend were waiting with beer and a barbecue.)
The weather turned out much better than expected and so we showed the kid some of the sights connected to the river.
The most famous one is the canal tunnel, the Weilburger Schifffahrtstunnel:
We saw a boy-girl double kayak team go through the lock, with the young woman operating the gates which meant a lot of physical work. I assume they took turns on the many locks on this stretch of the Lahn:
The tunnel itself is unique in Germany and it dates back to 1847. It is 195m long and its construction meant that a bend in the river could be circumnavigated to enable shipping on the Lahn up to Gießen (the German wikipedia article linked at the beginning of the post has nice graphics). Back when the tunnel was planned they had grand plans to eventually build a canal from the Lahn to the Elbe.
But things changed and ten years after it was finished the introduction of the railway to the Lahn valley meant that the tunnel lost its signifance.
Sight number two is much smaller in scale, but it also provided a useful service.
It's a small cable ferry which apparently dates back 300 years:
There are even bus stop like signs at both ends!
My father remembers this ferry from his youth, because he actually lived rather close by for some years.
So, even though we didn't need to cross the river, the kid had to be shown how the ferry works (and then they went back again!):
This is the ferryman:
(And then he had to go all the way back again to the other side, where his wife and a friend were waiting with beer and a barbecue.)
