Pienet höyrylaivat Suomen ja erityisesti Kainuun sisävesiliikenteessä 1870-luvulta 1960-luvulle

The significance in Finland of shipping on inland waterways has been great. This is due to the topography of the country with its many lakes and to the fact that the vast waterways in their natural state were easily navigable. The construction of canals resulted in even more extensive interconnected inland waterways. This study explores the tasks of the steamships plying these internal waterways, their numbers and significance, and also changes and the reasons for these between different inland waterways, as regards different types of vessels and shipowners in the period from the 1870s to the 1960s. Special attention is paid to steamships smaller than 19 net register tons. This limit was chosen because it was unusual for those smaller vessels to be included in the records kept by officialdom. The share of such small craft in inland waterway traffic as a whole was not generally noted. The present study refers to these individually as micro vessels and collectively as micro tonnage. It is known that 1870 there were 64 steamships afloat on inland waterways, of which approximately half were micro vessels. This number increased until in around 1930 it peaked at over 900. Two-thirds of these were micro vessels. Thereafter their number decreased, with 270 steamers still afloat in 1960, mostly micro tonnage. In the 1960s the use of these for economic purposes ceased almost completely. The number of passenger steamers was at its peak around the 1910s, but decreased thereafter as the transportation of passengers and freight was increasingly transferred from passenger vessels to the railways and later also to the roads. The share of micro tonnage of passenger vessels was just less than half. Of the freight carrying vessels, which at their greatest numbered 200, only few were micro vessels. In the 1900s tugboats generally comprised at least half of the steamships plying on inland waterways. Most of these were micro tonnage and as of the 1920s ninety per cent. The reason for this is obvious: the main characteristic of these vessels was not their capacity but their power, how much they could tow. Throughout the research period towing timber was the main concern in inland shipping. From the remote regions, where forestry was the main occupation, timber could generally be transported to the industrial plants only by floating it, mostly with the help of micro tonnage. Just over half of the passenger vessels were owned by private companies, but the small passenger vessels in particular were frequently owned by private entrepreneurs or others. Freight carrying vessels were owned by entrepreneurs but toward the end of the period studied also by industrial concerns. Most of the tugboats were owned either by companies in the forest industry or by timber floating concerns formed by sawmills.

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