What ever happened to water trains?
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How did the chain get put on and off the boat?
Long poles to pull it out of the water. Every 50 meters or so there was a chain link that had a sort of clasp that could be opened. So they could unlink it and thread it through. Naturally this took many hours and was very heavy.
They sank. Qestion
This sounds like an aquatic version of a cable car
But on cable cars, the cable moves, So, the engine is in a house, not in the vehicle. Great for electric propulsion, or even with coal. Because you can use a big chimney and won't blow the smoke in the street. On chain ships, the chain won't move, so it is more like a cog railway, so something to grab on to get somewhere.
"...that many of you watching this may never have heard of...." Nope, I did not know these were a thing.
We do know boats and ships were a thing though ✅
@@AdhvaithSane Sure, if you accept the lies of the MSM. ;)
I'm quite into naval history and I didn't even know this was a thing.
@@JiresHacobsame lol.
as bavarian, also never heard of this kind of ship.... well that is i think the true meaning of found and explained...
Many countries still use this system only perpendicular to the flow, as a means of crossing.
Ie a Ferry.
On the Mississippi River in the US
Occasionally they use actual rails.
Right. They are usually called cable ferries because they don't use chains anymore..
Near where I live there is a ferry that cross a river running a cable that is out of the water, using only the river current (and a little human labour).
I think that Tom Scott once made a video about a similar ferry in Germany.
Didn't Tom Scott make a video on that?
So we got regular trains, land trains and now water trains. Next step should then be air trains and fir.... space trains, right?
Right. Thought the same thing, but I imagine many things are still technologically possible….
we already have it, its called Starlink Constellation. albeit not having any rails
@@ohoh7570 Isn't it just a collection of satellites? By "train", I meant a vehicle or collection of vehicles carrying large amounts of cargo.
Nah, the billionaire tech bros are all about "pods" now - less efficient, more expensive, less capacity, but you don't need to sit next to poor people and brrr hyperloop go fast
Just wait until they realise they can move more people by joining pods together in some sort of end-to-end linear arrangement...
How about time trains. A train that goes through Time.
Just for future reference, Draught is actually pronounced draft. Just figured I should let you know, I'm not mad at you or anything.
It's the hosts thing. Every video, there is at least one word he struggles with, usually names which leads me to believe our host is dyslexic maybe
@@weldonwin Interesting hypothesis, you may be onto something
@@weldonwin AI generated?
@@williebruciestewie No, the host is definitely a real person and has appeared on camera in several videos. Some of it is because he's Australian and has trouble with certain words, mostly names as I pointed out, but sometimes he has trouble with words like Armaments (which he called Am-Rah-Ments) and Weaponry (Weh-Pon-Dree).
I believe he's reading from a script, his dyslexia causing him to misread words on the page. An AI Generated voice, wouldn't be making these kinds of mistakes.
Prevalent was another word with interesting pronunciation.
Heard of this idea for river crossing, but never for river navigation. Well worth the watch
Dear gods, can you imagine the noise that chain must have caused to someone inside the vessel?
I'm sure everything was well lubed with Wale fat.
@@Ichijoe2112 Yes, the women of Wales GB had some lard on 'em, they did. Now we have Walmart patrons.
Finally, more BOAT content
But you're a train guy.
I think it needs more Essex content.
THAT’S WHY HE’S THE BOAT
*THE BOOOOAT!!!*
@@AdhvaithSane😂
BOAT
Draught is pronounced draft!
My grandfather used the cables between the barges to grab on and swim upstream for some kilometers. The current would bring him back in half an hour. It was strictly forbidden.
He told me much about those, and all said in the video is correct. The chain rests only on the riverbed and would have to be layed down far outside in corners, or it would get to shore on the inside of the riverbed after a few uses.
BUT: Many of your pictures are misleading: The chains where extremly expensive, so only bigger streams with lots of things to move had these chains. And even as these ships only had little draught, they would not go on these little rivers in the video. They are too shallow and too windy. Also, the water jet system is only one of many, and only at the late models. It was big enough for getting the ship back downstream without the chain. Because if you get in oncoming traffic with only one chain, it would take hours to release the chain, pass, find and reattach the chain.
Another reason they stopped the service was the diesel engine. The service stopped between the world wars, so much later than steam paddle ships. All the barges had captains and had to be steared, so giving them their own diesel motor and propeller was easy and would give them much more freedom (not waiting for a chain ship with free capacity for days or weeks). And the barges/boats went bigger, so even more efficent
Forgot to mention: We live in Mannheim at the river rhein / rhine in Germany. My granddad has worked for the port authority there and tried to save one of those ships for the museum - but they were big, heavy and had a lot of rust - the last years of service didn't pay back, so the maintenance was reduced.
We have one in Poland near my home town Kolno, it was the only one I’d ever seen in my life anywhere . It’s still there, to this day, and the farmers use it to transfer supplies across the river in the rainy seasons
Nothing on the internet anywhere, but I believe you. A few things slip through the internet cracks I guess.
We had this on the river Main in the Frankfurt Area. Long time ago. The chain is still on the ground. Thanks for the vid.
You can still find the last of these ships in Aschaffenburg.
As a marine engineer this was incredibly interesting. I thought I knew about almost all historic marine propulsion plants..... as always every day I learn something new. I think the biggest oh wow of this is the fact they had jet propulsion figured out way back when, just not quite the bucket. Be interesting to do a deeper dive into those thrusters,
“Someone is wrong on the Internet. I have to fix it…”
The engineer in me groaned when you called an impeller a turbine. A turbine is driven, an impeller drives.
Damn learned something new!
There’s a chain ferry quite near me actually, but going cross-stream. We get a lot of tall sail ships where I am and bridges would not be viable, so the chain ferry provides routine access from one side to the other.
A riverbed chain, or a suspended aerial cable? I've seen the cable kind, pulleys and such?
@@Three_Random_Words riverbed. Aerial chain wouldn’t work for the same reason a bridge wouldn’t and the forces involved were it to be high enough for ship masts to pass under would be a lot to deal with.
@@AcrimoniousMirth It's just strange, because the internet has nothing of what this channel is talking about, which is not impossible I suppose, just unexpected.
Those ferries most likely rely on river currents instead of any kind of engine so it‘s not exactly the same system.
@@MrAranton no, they have engines. They’re not drift ferries.
they got replaced by pusher barges, some of them can consist of 10-12 units
I'm a third generation boilermaker, so I know some of my ancestors worked on these things. I'm just surprised I never heard of such a thing before! What a brilliant way to tackle a river! Thank you so much for creating this film, I'm almost 70 and never too old to learn!
i’d imagine it is hard to operate more than one boat in a river, as the chains are likely tangle in the waters
Yes many questions arise. Such as right of way, all other vessels would always have to give way to the chain ship. The chain ship company would have to secure the exclusive legal right to put their chain on the bottom of a whole river, which assumedly is usually public property.
You can
Just by combining them into single bigger ship. Which everyone did until this day
That’s what barges are for
We have one in my home country of Poland, it uses a small gas engine to crawl up and down across the river in the rainy seasons transferring supplies to the farmers on the other side of the river that encircles their properties
The system was used around here (Southern Germany) until after WW I. The tugboat company had a monopoly, the ships were nicknamed "river donkey". Only one chain was in the river, when encountering oncoming traffic, the downstream-going boat would need to drop it and get it back on board after the ships had passed each other. This would take about an hour.
In the 1920s, the rivers were made more shipping-friendly by installing dams and locks.
The Badger operating out of Ludington Michigan is still steam powered and takes autos across Lake Michigan. We have ridden it many times. It was designed to haul freight cars across the lake. The City Of Milwaukee ship is a museum in Manistee Michigan. It also hauled rail cars across the lake. You can even stay overnight on the City Of Milwaukee or enjoy the haunted ship during Halloween.
Another unique boat you should check out is the SS Badger. It ferries cars across Lake Michigan but was originally designed to ferry actual trains. At one point there was a fleet of them.
Oh also it’s the last of its kind.
Her sister ship the SS Wolverine still exists, used for spare parts .
And recently converted from coal. It is a steam boat with a steam uniflow engine. Very eff
I think Railroad Ferries were last used in the Russian tundra on the trans siberia railway, and possibly still in use today.
@@larrybremer4930there’re some regular passenger rail routes which use ferries. Trains from the main Italian boot to Sicily use one (although they’re thinking about a tunnel so it won’t be for long)
The spartan her sister ship is also there in Ludington. There's been some talk about the benefit vs cost ratio of getting the spartan into running condition. But at last check I think she's viewed as more valuable as a parts ship for the badger
Never heard of water trains. No train museum ever mentioned them. Learn something new everyday.
They never made it past the conceptual phase
@@user-en7wl7nt8y Thank you. Can't find anything on the net, just this channel. Maybe this youtuber is getting desperate for material?
Fascinating. I live near the Rhine, and yet I've never heard of these, so many thanks...
A very interesting system of which I haven't heard before.
It is not only other modes of transport which made these obsolete, but the development in water transport itself also.
Rivers have been canalised, or canals have been built parallel to shorten the route and have a corridor without currents, many other canals connecting existing water systems have been built into the last century.
And then the development in propulsion systems of the river barges and tugs themselves have made them a lot more powerful.
In the US the pusher boat with a consist of tied together barges was invented to navigate the large rivers, Europe introduced them in the 1950s to replace towed consists.
We now can see pusher boats navigating the canals and rivers with as many as 6 on the Rhine to 12 barges on the Danube. On the Mississippi river the record is 60 barges pushed along by just one pusher. Barges are not slung one after another but tied tightly into one large barge so to say, on the Rhine usually 2 across and 3 long or the 3 across and 2 long, on the Danube up to 4 wide and 3 long, a standard barge in Europe being 76,5m long and 11,4m wide. Also larger load carrying river boats can be seen with 1 or 2 barges tied alongside or in front.
Hi, nice video, pity that you missed on one of the critical drawbacks of the chain tugs: The tricky procedure of passing. The downward travelling tug had to anchor, open the chain, thread itself out, close it and drop it down for the upward tug to pass. Then, collect the chain from the river bead, open it again and thread into it before continuing. No wonder, they were dismissed on the Neckar in 1935 and the Main 1936. (th-cam.com/video/nuLRVhTwgL8/w-d-xo.html). There are still a few hulls around.
Thank you Gerald! Great stuff.
exactly why I'm subscribed to you! to see super wacky vehicles, and have a high quality explanation of it. I wish you well Found And Explained!
I've gone on a cable ferry that is quite similar to these except that it always goes in a straight line. As far as I know, a couple of them are still operating in BC.
They are not called boat if they are attached to each other. The whole thing is then called anything from boat to boaoaoaoaoaoat, etc..
b (oa)^n t depending on how many boats are chained together.
Dad?
😂😂
Thanks, Jarod! Good work!
This is one of the most interesting topics you've ever covered. Great video.
So pleased to hear about something I'd never heard of. Thanks!
Thanks for this video I introduced your channel to my grandpa a few weeks back and he passed away recently thanks for the joy you gave him
Deepest wishes to you and your family during this hard time. I’m glad I gave your grandpa some joy before he passed
@@FoundAndExplained Thank you i have a playlist of all the videos he couldn't watch Thanks for giving him so much Happiness your videos do impact people in a good way. have a great night
@njcummins Yours is the best dialogue I’ve ever heard on TH-cam @9:42 in when you say, “…taking the rivers by storm…” 😂🤣😂. So refreshing. So much better than the ad pitch lines pushing some product “…taking the world by storm…”that I’ll never buy.
You’ve got a nice twist on a shopworn phrase!!!
You’ve got a great channel going too. Keep it up!
One important concept was missing in the report. If you pull a rope hanging out of your boat, you get the rope into your boat. Unless the rope is fixed with some kind of anchor.
But the chain couldn't have anchors, cause it's supposed to be lifted without moving downstream. This is just avoided by friction on the riverbed, nobody can pull a 100km long chain. No need to fix it anywhere (like It's necessary for cross river ferries). So even when the chain broke, it didnt effect boats in 10km distance.
An amazing invention, I had no knowledge of these means of transport.
Never heard of one thanks for dropping knowledge!
Never heard of these even though they apparently were used right were I live! Fascinating and for their time ingenious machines. I always enjoy when I learn something I absolutely have never heard before, thank you!
Never knew these existed, lol! This was fascinating, posted this on my community tab!!
I wondered about boat trains after they were mentioned in the Downton Abbey series
Thanks for the video
I love the detail of this video keep making more like this i love it!
The boats that replaced them were so go , You could say they were off the chain. 😊
Can confirm I’ve never heard of water trains until you made this video. Very interesting
I cannot believe I have never heard of these before!
Really learned something here! Never heard about this before.
Clever people have always existed, it's just a question of how much knowledge they had and the materials available.
I've never heard of this mode of transport and it's so cool that I'm hearing about it now.
Completely new to me. Thanks!
One of these steamers, namely the Gustav Zeuner, is fully reconstructed and displayed in a museum in the German city of Magdeburg.
The last one I was travelling on was a ferry in Kyle of Lochalsh in Scottlan sometimes in 80ties
Had no clue. Great learning experience.
Excellent video 👍 Thank you 💜
Still pretty common for ferries. In the UK we have a large vehicle chain-ferry at Studland in Dorset, also there's one on the River Dart, and I rode one in the Lake District but I can't remember where. I also used on on the road North from Cairns towards the Daintree, in Australia. Works really well as a ferry solution.
I guess this design still exists in a way, in the form of cable ferries. They work essentially in the same manner but usually just cross short river crossings for a small number of cars in rural or remote areas. My home town region in British Columbia has several of these.
Many countries still use chain ferries. The nearest one to me is the King Harry Ferry which crosses the River Fal in Cornwall, England.
This reminds me of a Book about ships chapter called "freak ships" about the SS Connector. Designed as a multiple articulated hulls module designed to contour the rough waves. The ship scrapped after the first sea trial after disappointing results.
There are still a few chain ferries in the UK, such as one going from Bournemouth to the Isle of Purbeck.
Amazing find.
Nice video about evolution of cable ferry
This is still a thing, in a way. You won't see them used as tug boats anymore but there are still ferries about that use chain to pull themselves across bodies of water.
Barges tied together and towed by another vessel never went out of fashion. The only thing that changed was the motive power.
There's also a barge called a Car Float. They were used in the states to float rail cars/carriages about. They'd also hook several of them together for towing, which is the most water train thing I can think of.
They still use a chain ferry, for one the crossings from England to Wales. In the place called Swansea. It is used because of the high current.
I think i've already watched this video 8 times because its so interesting, like i've never ever heard of this
I have seen a use of this system for a ferry across the River Blyth between North Blyth & South Blyth in North East England. Admittedly nowhere near so long but using a chain along the bed of the river & an on board steam engine to power it. This was in the early 1960’s when it was already an anachronism.
There are still lots of ferries that work this way, just across the river or straight, instead of along it. That way the chain/rope is much shorter and useful.
With a single boat per chain, and a chain with fixed ends, it's a rather primitive concept.
I had no idea about these...I couldn't even have imagined the way it functioned. I know about the river crossing ferries that use perpendicular component of the river current to go back and forth, that's ingenious too, but this is completely different.
Came into this thinking it was gonna be about the weird world of water cars and how railroads often had to ship water to customers along their line... Boy was I severely mistaken.
That's one of the coolest things I had never heard of.
Please more content like this!
Thanks Jared
The Rhine River saw Schleppers and horses drawing ships. Today 2 ships are also tied together at the bow or side by side.
Yup, never heard of such. I can totally see the chain getting hung up on rocks and sunken trees.
Why should a tree sink ? It's wood. And rolling rocks, too big to be moved away by lifting the chain, might be very rare.
@@holger_p they sink when they are waterlogged. That’s how we got that word😉 and some trees aren’t even sawed down. They leave them, build dams and the water level rises when making reservoirs.
well that is something else I have never heard about.
Never seen or heard of before, cool, thanks
I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF THIS... And the reason I'm surprised they don't exist is because in rapids you could have the boat/train go over grooves/tracks until they pass the rapids
Props to Jared!
In the Netherlands there are still small ferries that use a chain (gier pont).
@FoundAnExplained: Why WaterTrains did not succeed: I only agree with that steam engines got powerful. That is one part of the story. There came a totally disruptive kid to town who pushed even the paddle steamer into submission: The propeller matured.
Please do more videos like this
Holy crap, this type of craft is amazing. I can see why it didnt stick around, but it would be interesting to have seen if the tech was iterated on more.
Wow, never heard of these before, pretty cool, and pretty smart.
Well you're right, I've never heard of these things. Interesting though, great content as always 👏
Not exactly the same thing, but there are some cable ferries out there still. The coolest one I remember is a cable ferry that uses the river current to push against the hull like a sail.
Many car and passenger ferries use chains. One that immediately comes to mind is the one across Poole harbour in Dorset (that's in the UK, for those unfamiliar with geography). I've also seen a report on a chain ferry powered by electricity in Denmark (I think - my memory isn't what it was).
Well, water-trains still exist, as in one tug pulling a number of barges. However, they don't pull themselves along chains any more, but use propellers or Voith-Schneider rotors instead, and the barges are closely lashed together to have one big unit rather than a lot of boats on a string.
I am from Bavaria (the famous diamonds just as white and blue just as the bands around the funnels), and have seen a couple of models of these tugs in museums. Although I have always wondered how the chain was anchored in the river bed and how that worked out around bends. Thanks for the clarification.
While they are not trains, more like Ferries, Michigan (USA) still has a small number of vessels that use a chain driven system to cross inland bodies of water, to get to their destination. It is a unique experience to take a trip on one.
I could see a reason to bring back a modern version of this for the Mississippi river. To this day boats can carry more lbs. with less energy usage than land vehicles or air vehicles. Since the Mississippi goes from the top of the US to the bottom it seems a wise idea to me and for those green folks I'm surprised they have yet to began shouting it out.
I'm sad you didn't mention the modern iteration of this where there are ferries that cross a channel following a guide-wire there also supplies electricity so that they don't have to have massive batteries onboard.
Well, although it might not be so common in the world, here in Sweden, we have a lot of "water trains", or as we call them, "line-ferries". It's actually very common to find them in the Stockholm archipelago.
Very well done. I thought it would be about ferries that carried trains.
Awesome video!
Kinda vaguely knew about them as a thing, but thought for a while they were a sort of push/pull kind of screw propeller tug.
Then saw the illustration of the barges being on longer leads and immediately thought " That's dumb, how would the barges stay under steering control when going down stream and not get wildly out of line..."
Then came the " these were only around for fifty years and is a design likely never to be used or seen again." Which got the "Yeah, it's a design made by someone that should really have learned more by observing than just saying they were smart and knew things because they had book learning." Water near the edge of a river acts very different from the middle. Plus there's sunken snags from flooding or erosion to think about. Silting over your drag chain, on and on.
Yes I can see where this would have been a revolutionary idea and design when first deployed. But any rubbing of brain cells together would see the glaring flaws quickly. None the less, a neat part of history and archaic design features that were absolutely a no turn around dead end.
The barge trains throughout the Mississippi basin come pretty close to this. A tug pushes a maybe four-long three-wide group of barges
No, totally different system since the tug is not tied to a chain. The tugboats replaced this system. The chain system can not use compound engines (they run to jerky) but wheel and screw tugs could. So more flexible ship using less coal. And with tugs in continental europe often being state monopolies- that was the end
You mentioned that one problem was the force needed to lift the chain from the riverbed. Wouldn't that be offset by the weight of the chain returning to the riverbed on the other end of the boat?
I'll have the Touage de Riqueval with the white sauce and a nice Chablis.
Train on the water, boat on a track
I took a train across the Atlantic, i hope it won't sink like Titanic🎶🎵🔊🎤
i would like more like this
Well at the five finger Rapids on the Yukon the built a shotlrt strch of that for the paddlewheeler going upstram. The were quite common in Europe until the mid 1960ies,f.e. Rivers Main and Mosel, as well as Rhine and Rhone
They had something like this in the first few episodes of attack on titan if I remember, when people where escaping from shiganshina. The only major difference was that the pully track link style system was on top of the boat/water train and grabbed a suspended net hanging between support structures down the length of the canals/rivers.
working on one of these must've been super loud due to the rattling of the chains
This concept is still in use in tens if not hundreds of locations around the world as chain or cable ferries.
Some ferry services still operate on the same principle.