A great stop-off and only a couple of hundred km from the channel now and we visited the Strépy-Thieu boat lift. Doesn’t sound that exciting, right? Wrong! This enormous twin lift, completed in the 1980’s raises huge canal boats (and we are talking up to 100 m long and 12 m wide) 70 meters between the upper and lower canals. For a decade or so it held the world record for the highest boat lift. It’s bloody huge.
We’ve seen many of the big canal boats around europe – the standard dates back to the 1950s when a new 1350 ton standard was devised. It’s extended from there right up to 280 m long by 35 m wide. So if you ever wondered why Europe can still make canals commercially viable and in the UK it’s cheaper to move boats by road, never mind bulk goods, there’s your answer: infrastructure investment and scale!
The lift replaced a series of four lifts built in the 1900’s. The old lifts are still in situ and are a UNESCO world heritage site.
Anyway, it was a wonderful 25 km cycle around the old and new lifts. Parking here is pretty idyllic – it’s free as in speech and beer and is on the banks of the canal. It would have been an awesome drone shot of the mothership, the canal and the lift, but in Belgium, unless you have taken and exam and have a registered drone, you have a 10 m height limit and must be over private ground. So it was not to be…
