Inland Waterway

Sections date to the 5th century BCE, but the Sui dynasty completed the through route in the 7th century CE with massive corvee la...

The Nile's current runs north while prevailing winds blow south, giving boats a free ride each way, an accident of geography that ...

Dug largely with hand tools and animal power between 1817 and 1825, the canal ran from Albany to Buffalo through 83 locks. Freight...

The first steamboat reached New Orleans in 1811, and within decades shallow-draft, high-pressure boats pushed cotton bales downstr...

The Mannheim Act of 1868 internationalized navigation and abolished tolls, opening the river to industrial traffic just as the Ruh...

Seven locks between Montreal and Lake Erie, with the Welland Canal alone climbing about 100 meters past Niagara, let oceangoing ve...

Ocean ships reach Nanjing and river fleets push far beyond, with roughly 2,800 kilometers of navigable waterway. System cargo volu...

The 1992 Rhine-Main-Danube canal closed the gap to the North Sea, creating a 3,500 kilometer trans-European waterway through ten c...

From the Tibetan plateau through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, the Mekong moves bulk cargo, sand, rice, fe...

Lakers, ships up to 300 meters long that never leave the system, haul taconite iron ore from Duluth and Marquette to the steel mil...

Ocean ships reach Iquitos in Peru, about 3,700 kilometers from the sea, often cited as the world's most distant ocean port, and ba...

Pushed convoys of twenty to thirty barges run soy, maize and fuels downriver from Paraguayan and Bolivian terminals past Rosario, ...

Opened in 1952 after construction with convict labor under brutal conditions, the canal's thirteen locks lift traffic about 88 met...

Pierre-Paul Riquet persuaded Louis XIV to back a canal from Toulouse to the Etang de Thau near Sete, and work from 1666 to 1681 pr...

The Duke of Bridgewater hired engineer James Brindley and agent John Gilbert to move coal from his mines at Worsley, where the can...

Charlemagne began a trench between the river basins in 793, the Fossa Carolina, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria opened a small canal ...