Barging Remains The Wave Of The Future

This year, physical construction began on France’s biggest infrastructure project in decades, the Seine-Nord Canal, featured in this issue. The canal it replaces, the Canal Du Nord, was a narrow bottleneck that could only accommodate old-style small barges of 650 tons. It kept France’s internal waterway and canal network from fully exploiting its connection to major Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and German waterways, including the Scheldt, the Rhine River and major commercial hubs like the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

The new canal will accommodate 4,000- to 4,400-ton vessels, the equivalent of multiple tractor-trailers. These new vessels will be similar to American-style pushboats, although smaller, pushing tows of two barges that are each larger than typical American barges.

Both France and England experienced canal-building booms in the 18th and 19th centuries, just before the railroad boom slowed and partially displaced canals.

But only partially; waterborne transportation of heavy, slower bulk cargoes never went away even as passengers and certain high-value cargoes shifted to rail. France recognized this with the Freycinet Plan that began in the 1870s, a decades-long infrastructure initiative that expanded the country’s rail network, but at the same time invested millions of francs in internal waterways and ports — crucially standardizing canals and lock widths to make internal cargo transport by water faster and smoother. The effect was to weld together rail and waterways into a more integrated transport system.

America’s most active waterways and lock and dam buildout, by contrast, didn’t come until the 1930s, partly because the natural Mississippi River network we are blessed with was so much greater and more extensive to begin with than anything in Europe. That buildout unlocked economic benefits that continue to this day.

Today. inland water transport accounts for only about 3 percent of freight movement in France, compared to between 14 and 17 percent in the United States. What the Seine-Nord Canal shows is that France recognizes that waterways freight transport continues to be the wave of the future. Its cost advantages and environmental benefits not only persist but grow even greater with technological changes.