Rhine River, 9/12/1994 Is Mostly Commercial Boat Traffic

Sport Boats Few
On River

By Bob Van Leer

(ON THE RHINE RIVER, GERMANY, Sept. 12, 1994) - Our cruise boat headed upstream (south) this morning at 4:00. The Rhine is Europe's most important waterway and has the reputation of being the most attractive scenicly.

  Commercial traffic dominates the river. There are sport boats, but they are few. The standard craft is a self-propelled barge perhaps 150 feet long carrying all manner of cargo, coal, oil, grain, cement and so forth.

  We passed Remagen this morning, a bridge of World War II fame. The U. S. Army captured the Ludendorf Bridge at Remagen, the only bridge across the Rhine not destroyed by the retreating German army. Its capture probably shortened the war.

  This middle reach of the river is highly developed. Roads and railroads parallel both banks. There are frequent large and small towns along the banks and a lot of vineyards. The Germans are efficient, organized and thorough. The bridges we passed underneath are painted on the bottom.

  Each side of the river has kilometer markings, nor just each kilometer, but down to the tenths. We stopped for an hour at the town of Linz and strolled downtown, but it was too early for many shops to be open.

  This boat runs with Germanic efficiency, on time, we found when one passenger was not back on time and was left. The passenger caught up with us later by taxi and the boat did stop at a dock to pick up the missing passenger.

  Koln-Dusseldorfer Deutsche Rheinschiffahrt AG is the official name of the cruise line, abbreviated to KD German Rhine Line. Our boat docked for the evening at Rudesheim am Rhein, a city of about 10,000.

  After dinner we visited the Siegfried Mechanisches Musikkabinett, a "museum for automatic music instruments". It's a collection of some of the darndest Rube Goldberg devices I've ever seen. There were always efforts to be able to play music without musicians. The player piano is perhaps the most famous. These efforts reached their finest flower in the 19th century before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. There were two main principles of design, the music box and the player piano paper roll.

  Working with these, designers created contraptions that played up to seven instruments, some of which would take half of a small room. My favorite was a player piano with an accordion on top and a set of drum and cymbals to top it overall. All of these played, after a fashion. Near the top for ingenuity was a device that played a real violin. Some of these devices were made to be coin-operated.

  After the museum we strolled back through the Drosselgasse, a street about 10 feet wide and lined with beer halls and restaurants. We stopped to be able to have a beer in a real German beer hall.Tomorrow, we have a short cruise to Mainz and will leave the passenger boat for a tour to Heidelberg before boarding a train to Lucerne, Switzerland.
----<>----