Canals between the Rhine River and the Danube were long envisioned and achieved only with difficulty. The vision was a water highway extending from the North Sea at Rotterdam, Netherlands to the Black Sea. This water route could be traversed in about a third of the time it would take for a sailing vessel to go through the Mediterranean Sea. The first canal, the Rhine-Rhône, was built between 1784 and 1833 and is now largely abandoned. The main driver for this canal was to build a Freedom Monument in Kelheim and then to encourage trade along the river. The current canal, called the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, took more than 30 years to complete. The first section, from Bamberg to Nuremberg was completed and then funding was withdrawn by the German Government because of the change in political fortunes and environmental concerns. It took 15 years before work started once again, after all the planning was reworked with the intent of making the canal look more like a river than like a canal. There are 34 locks on the canal to lift boats up and over the several hundred feet of elevation that must be traversed. Some of the locks are very deep — and two of them are more than 80 feet.

Locks were very interesting on the trip. We went through a total of 68 locks on the cruise, meaning that the ship spent more than 35 hours of cruising time traversing locks. We often had to wait for another boat to come out of a lock before we could go in. From Budapest to about the middle of the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, we went up at each lock. We would sail into the lock, the doors would close, water would be let into the lock and lift the boat up to the next level. The front doors would open and we would sail out. Then another boat would sail in going down and reverse the process. On the Danube and Rhine Rivers, no pumps were needed for the locks as water was flowing downstream. On the canal, however, the water had to come from somewhere. So each of the locks also generate electricity as the water is let out of the lock. That electricity is used to pump water from the Danube River up to the highest stretch of the canal. That water is then flows downstream from that point to make the locks work.

On the Rhine and Danube, all the locks were associated with power-generating dams. On the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, the locks were used to get boats up and over the hills separating the Danube Valley from the Rhine Valley. It didn’t take long before locks became old and boring, made even more so as I would always loose my wireless connection when we went through a lock. Since we went through most of them at night, it was quite often the case that I’d be checking e-mail before going to bed or before going to breakfast and we would sail into a lock.

The economics of the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal are still being debated. It was originally going to take six years and cost about 200 million Euros. In the end, it took more than 15 years and cost more than 6 billion Euros. The canal was opened in 1992 to great fanfare. It was already too narrow when it finally opened and the six-day journey in smaller cargo ships on the canal compared to a sixteen-day journey in huge cargo ships on the Mediterranean makes for difficult economics. The number of cargo boats on the Danube River was about a third of the number on the Rhine River. Right now it looks like the Mediterranean is winning. However, now that Eastern Europe is beginning to thrive, trade along the Danube will become much more important as every major Eastern European city found in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldovia, and Bulgaria are all either on the Danube River, or on major rivers that flow into the Danube. So, the canal may yet turn out to be fortune rather than folley.