Water Trains

     The cheapest way of shipping large quantities of marketable goods or military supplies is over water. Because of buoyancy reducing the object's weight, rivers are the bloodlines of civilization and ocean access is one of the most important factors in determining a nation's economic status. The United States has huge navigable coasts with protected harbors in the Atlantic Ocean for trade with Europe and Africa and the Pacific Ocean for trade with China, India, and Japan. The appreciation of ocean access has only become fully acknowledged recently. While ancient Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and the Chinese all used waterways for shipping and military purposes, little is known if the ancients realized that trade is what created a nation's economic might and that trade is controlled through water.
     After European ascendance with colonies on every continent, England became a huge proponent of naval power. Though the Dutch East India Company established control over spice islands before the British, the British did it better, bigger, and longer. Controlling the oceans without a challenge for well over a century, the British demonstrated that oceanic power controlled trade and led to a prosperous empire.
     As the Industrial Revolution sparked the mass production of goods, producers needed to expand market reach to sell surpluses never conceived of before. Britain developed a man-controlled inland shipment system built around manipulation of rivers to aid shipping routes: canals. Within a few years, canals threaded over the English countryside from small supply villages to the massive factory hubs of the great cities. The United States joined in the canal race, and the Erie Canal, one of the longest ever built, demonstrated the vast improvements offered by these waterways. Before the Erie Canal, goods from the Great Lakes to New York City took two weeks on wagon roads. When the canal opened in 1825, shipping prices dropped to ten percent pre-opening price and the travel time halved.

     Mostly forgotten in the modern age because of the effectiveness, greater speed and decreased terrain limitations of the locomotive, canals changed the landscape of industrializing countries by easing trade and transport and developing lock systems. The lock system for canals leveled long stretches of ground that sped railway creation for trains just decades later.
     Canals still have an important impact on the global economy. The modern Suez Canal, completed in 1869, linked Britain with her Asian colonies, notably India. The British protected this artery from Napoleon and through both world wars. The other major modern canal, the Panama Canal, was built by the United States in 1914 to link the east and west coast of the country by halving the time of sailing around the Cape Horn. Both the Suez and Panama Canals are vital for international trade in the modern era while many smaller canals are now abandoned or only used as tourist attractions and for recreational use.
     Though the longevity of the canal boom was shorter than a human life time, the huge improvements on the speed and quantity of trade to previously isolated areas opened the world to the full effects of the Industrial Revolution and to the power of change. The canal made it possible for man to think of large-scale geological change to achieve his needs over the long term, and from that, civilization has not looked back. Though most of the tracks for the water trains have long been locked, the trade history still flows freely.


 __    
Agatha Tyche