Inland Waterway Traffic
The aim of this series is to show the development of transnational traffic on the inland waterways of central Europe from 1845 to 1913. Key indicator for the performance of rivers and canals are the amount of goods shipped - or rafted - across borders. Central Europe has been chosen because comparable statistical information on other parts of Europe is lacking over much of this time period. And even for central Europe, recourse had to be taken to a national set of statistics – that of Germany – for most of the period. The scale in this series varies from map to map, so the reader has to use the legend for orientation on the scales of the arrow-styled diagrams which represent the amount of goods passing through border transit points by ship (or barge) on select waterways. In the first two maps – and in a special map on small transit points -, several years are shown per map, while in the remaining maps the flows for one specific reference year have been mapped, generally by using eight-year intervals. The data used in these maps has been taken from A. Kunz, Statistik der Binnenschiffahrt in Deutschland, 1835-1989 (1999).
