DARMSTADT: The Rhine

On weekends in Darmstadt, my favorite pastime was to drive half an hour west to the Rhine.

I grabbed a Brötchen (sandwich roll) at the snack-bar trailer on the bank and waited for the ferry.

Fifty years later, the ferry’s still there. Same one, built in ’66. I started riding it in ’69.

It was fall and a blustery Monday. That sign on the lower left of the snack stand says Monday’s a holiday. Almost nobody around.

Waiting’s the same. The one other person waiting looked more impatient than I.

On the eastern side, we’re in tiny Kornsand, really a small gravel bank. German records mention a ferry at this spot in 1373, but there are signs the Romans crossed here a thousand years earlier.

The river’s only about 1,000 feet wide at this point, moving at a moderate 3- to 4-feet per second. The crossing has caught the eye of the military for centuries.

It’s where Patton’s Third Army made the first modern assault crossing in the dark of night in March 1945 — without offical permission, of course — to no resistance.

Today there’s a NATO crossing just below here, available in case tanks or other heavy equipment need to get across. It’s called a “replacement” ramp, extending out into the river on both sides, as it would be used to replace a bridge. 

The ramp, one of about 150 in Germany, is used, too. Twenty years ago, a jumbo jet was cut into five pieces and transported across here en route to a museum. Signs say “keep off,” but nobody does.

At this point, the Rhine separates the German state of Hesse on the east bank from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate on the west. In late 19th Century, there was talk of building a bridge, especially for trains to carry ore. But it never happened, and today the ferry crossing lies in a 30-mile stretch between bridges at Mainz and Worms. 

The Landskrone (Land’s Crown) ferry carries passengers, cars and bicycles between Nierstein and Kornsand every day of the year, leaving every 30 minutes between roughly 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. On this eastern bank, you’ve got silos of a sand-and-gravel company and equipment for loading barges. On the western bank, on a clear day, you can see the ruins of Landskron castle on a hill. 

Before swinging out into the current, the captain lets an ore ship chug on down the river in front of us. Even laboring against the current, it takes only a couple of minutes to clear.

Then the ferry engine starts to roar, the riveted steel floor shakes under foot and chains clang as the bow car-ramp is secured. The ferry shoves off.

Modern technology allows use of the river ‘round the clock. If traffic is averaging 300 ships a day around this point — and captains are taking care to stay out of queues at locks — you could see a barge go by about every five minutes.

It’s a treat to lie on the riverbank, pop the top off the neck of a brown beer bottle and watch the riverboat giants chug by, a thousand pounds of cargo forcing hulls down nearly to water level. The patient chugging (especially upstream) of the monster barges, long as a football field, can lull you to sleep.

The water seems calm, but at this time of year, its temperature is in the low- to mid-50s F. I’m not going to test it. The wind blasts across the throbbing deck, and it’s hard to keep the hair out of my eyes.

There’s a passenger cabin under that tower, but I decide to stick it out where I can shoot photos more easily.

The depth of the Rhine varies wildly along its 500 navigable miles, even more during a prolonged drought like this one. Measures and forecasts — issued daily — are critical to the thousands of ships that ply these waters carrying coal, iron ore, grain, potash, petroleum, iron and steel and timber. But also cruising passengers. PBS watchers are very familiar with that ad about the Rhine journeys of the Viking “long ships.”

A 20-foot-deep barge, carying more than 1,500 metric tons, needs about eight feet of water to get by. Naturally, the river is shallower at the banks. A navigation channel in the middle might be about six feet deep.

Our ferry, crossing bank to bank, needs about four feet, the crew member said.  Cruise ships can sail when the river depth is about 2.5 feet. 

Despite news accounts of cruises being stopped and passengers forced to take the bus around the river at low points, river traffic is not stopped by authorities. Our crew member says the decision is left to ship owners and captains based on the draft of the barges.

One of life’s little truisms is that the Rhine flows north. It rises in the Swiss Alps and ends in the North Sea in the Netherlands. During Spring, it’s fed by melting snow in the Alps. During winter, it drains big tributaries such as the Neckar, Main and Mosel. The resulting powerful even flow has made the Rhine one of the busiest waterways in Europe. 

Today, the ferry’s across in minutes. The deck crew member collects €2 from passengers on foot and €5 from cars. No trucks this trip.

The ride over took me to the western bank of the Rhine and the vineyards that line the hills. If you drink white, you know Oppenheim and Niernstein from labels. 

On the western bank, a hiker could spend hours sauntering through paths above the hillside trellises, then pause at a shaded cafe in town with a glass of the local Riesling before walking back along the road to the ferry landing.

Storms develop quickly, though, on the wide, flat Rhine plain. More than once, a sudden dark gray sky has pelted me with wind-whipped rain before I got to the shelter of the ferry cabin. 

The sky’s iffy, and the wind’s a wild ride down by the river. But I love that wine and I like my chances.

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