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320 tons of shipping history

When the “Württemberg”, the last side wheel tug on the river Elbe, set off on her farewell voyage to Czechoslovakia in April 1974, she had covered 800,000 km and transported two billion tonne-kilometres in over sixty years. Built in 1908/1909 in Roßlau/Saxonia, the ship towed barges between Hamburg and Ústí nad Labem for the shipping lines Neue Deutsch-Böhmische-Elbeschiffahrt Dresden and, after its expropriation in 1947, for the VEB Binnenreederei Berlin.

Side-wheel tugs could pull up to ten barges behind them, weighing between 700 and 1,300 tonnes. Sometimes even two tugs were harnessed in front of the convoy. As they only had a draught of about one metre, they were ideally suited for navigation on the Elbe. Older people may still remember the barges that transported salt from Schönebeck to Neštěmice and were loaded with hard coal on the way back to Magdeburg.

On her farewell tour, hundreds of spectators watched in every old shipping town along the Elbe to wave a last farewell to the Württemberg; in Dresden there are said to have been as many as thousands. Today the steamer is moored at Magdeburg’s Rotehorn Park, refitted as a museum ship and restored to its original 1909 condition. In addition to the boiler and engine room, it also has an exhibition on the history of Elbe shipping.