The Abandoned Monster Vehicle of Fonseranes

hello bonjour and bundorn it is january 2021 and i'm in the south of france at the canal staircase of fonseca built way back in 1697 it allows boats to climb more than 20 meters uphill over a sequence of eight consecutive locks and boats were doing that for nearly three centuries before someone said hang on isn't there a better way to do this that someone was a french engineer called jean albert and in the early 1980s he got permission to construct an experimental alternative right here next to the canal staircase i can see what we've come here for and what he came up with was this so in today's video we're answering the question what the consecutive lock is that this is the town of busy in the deep south of france and we're in the historic region of longrduk and the official modern region of oxitangi and it's a beautiful old town it's famous for its 13th century cathedral its annual bull fighting festival and the local rugby club who were the best team in the country back in the 70s and 80s meanwhile geographically the town lies at the crossroads of the river orb and the legendary canal du midi and of course we're not here to see any of oh hang on wait we actually sort of are the 240 kilometer long canal du midi is quite simply one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 1600s it was built to connect france's mediterranean coast to the city of toulouse where it met the river gahon which flows into the atlantic at bordeaux and because the gahon was according to wikipedia more or less navigable when the canal opened in 1681 it meant that french boats could more or less navigate all the way from the atlantic to the mediterranean and later on in the 1800s that journey became much easier after the french dug a new canal parallel to the gerhan joined it all up to the canalgi midi and called the whole thing le canal de dumere or in english the canal of the two seas because it connects the mediterranean sea and the atlantic sea now obviously doing that trip in a canal boat is not as easy as all that because for a start the junction with the gohan in toulouse is more than 130 metres above sea level which means science fans to get your boat from the mediterranean sea to toulouse you don't just have to get it to go along a bit you also have to get it to go up a bit and to do that on a canal you're going to need locks lots of locks originally there were 86 of the things and each time you have to open it close it fill it open it close it and going through something like the staircase at han can take as much as three or four hours but at the end of the day you can't really avoid it or can you three centuries after the fonts hand locks first went into operation jean ober who himself was in his 80s by this point came up with an experimental alternative solution he was going to bypass the staircase he was going to make the whole process much quicker and all he was going to need was a giant 400 meter water slide and an insane monster vehicle straight out of a jerry and sylvia anderson series and here's how it worked the boat would enter the slope at the bottom end passing underneath the parked vehicle once it was in position a barrier would be lowered into the water behind the boat and the machine would then start pushing the barrier the boat and the water it was floating in all the way up the slope now as far as i can tell there is only one video on the whole of youtube possibly the whole internet that actually shows it working it was filmed on a camcorder in 1990 and uploaded way back in 2009 but by sheer luck they still checked their comments and gave me permission to share a few seconds of it here i'll put a link in the description in case you want to go and see the full three-minute video unfortunately though this is what the water slope and the vehicle look like today so what went wrong in theory it was a very clever piece of engineering it did make the journey a lot quicker and it probably would have worked if it wasn't for several catastrophic flaws firstly it was about 200 years too late for there to be enough canal traffic to make it worth building in the first place secondly they had all kinds of trouble with oil leaking out of the vehicle's hydraulics and dropping onto the tracks below which had the effect of thirdly lubricating the slope and from there well it all went downhill very quickly but it really did there were further problems with insurance and contracts and what really killed it off was a complicated hydroelectric power system that i won't pretend to understand but basically the machine was supposed to regenerate its own electricity from water pressure on the way back down the system was never reliable it kept failing and on the 11th of april 2001 after 17 years of extremely sporadic service the authorities officially gave up and it was abandoned forever since then the machine has sat here in silence as a giant rusting monument to civil over engineering to be fair to mushy uber it was only ever supposed to be an experiment and in the end it feels like he just tried too many things at once maybe it would have been different if he'd built a water slope but with a more conventional machine or even built the same machine but with a more conventional engine maybe diesel engines like he did on his other water soap at montage wait you're telling me there's another one of these [Music] what if you'd like to visit the monster of fonseca and the historic canal staircase next door it's an easy half hour walk along the canal from central bezier and its railway station the site was upgraded a few years ago obviously it's all closed right now but there's an information center there's toilets there's a really nice looking restaurant and it's all fully wheelchair accessible apart from the monster itself which you're not supposed to access anyway but because the place was closed there was no one around to shout at me if you enjoyed this video please do subscribe if you haven't already so that you can get part two and until then thank you very much for watching and i will see you soon you

Channel: The Tim Traveller

Views: 383,822

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Id: N34QXyr-FY4

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021