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We spent a week in Belgium a couple of years ago, mainly in Ypres. We drove for a couple of hours to visit the inclined plane at Ronquières on the Brussels-Charleroi Canal only to find the visitors' facilities closed, but it wasn't an entirely wasted trip. The plane is over 1500 yards long a lifts boats of up to 1350 tonnes almost 220 feet in 40 minutes. It by-passes an earlier flight of locks and handles far larger craft. It was opened in the 1960's. Although traffic is below expectations and only one caisson is used regularly, we saw three boats use the plane and filmed one passage. The pictures on this page are taken direct from the digital video. The plane is dominated by the 400ft observation/control tower. There is a viewing gallery for visitors at the top, the windows lower down are for the control room. Click on a picture to see a larger version (.JPG 30-70k).
The two caisson tracks are either side of the picture. I filmed from the end of the service access road (which came out about a third of the way down the plane) and also just the other side a sign reading "access interdit" - but I can't read much french(!). The pictures below show the view looking down the plane - on the right a boat can be seen entering the caisson.
The caissons work on a counterweight system. Some lifts and inclines and lifts have two caissons that counterbalance each other, but at Ronquieres each caisson has a large trough under it in which a counterweight runs in the opposite direction to the caisson. The counterweight is shown below passing and then having passed.
As the counterweight passed it made an incredible sound and the ground shook - I think the "thunks" were caused by the wheels passing over joins in the rails they run on. If you would like to listen the counterweight passing click here (44k .MP3 file) - the recording can't do the sound justice, but you'll get the idea! |
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