2017-11 - Blog Posts
Moissac: home to the world's best grapes (IMO)
Located on the river Tarn in southwestern France, Moissac is most famous for its grapes, specifically Chasselas. This green, sweet and thin-skinned grape is just marvellous, my personal favourite, and Chasselas de Moissac season is a sure sign that Autumn is nearly here.
When I saw that Moissac wasn't too far from where I was living at the time, of course I had to visit, and as the photos demonstrate, it was well worth the trip on a sunny, unseasonably warm early November day (I ate lunch on the terrace at the restaurant, that's insane for November!).
The heart of the town is its 11th-century Romanesque abbey. The monks there had a vineyard to tend to (what else?), and as the railways and tourism developed in the 19th century, Moissac envisioned becoming a "uval resort", in the same vein as thermal or seaside resorts, only with grapes as the centre theme. A full uval complex didn't come to fruition, but the local grapes began to be transported out of the region for the rest of France to appreciate. Cheers!
The Montech water slope
At around the same time as the "Inclined Plane" of Saint-Louis-Arzviller, other types of boat lifts were being engineered in other places. One of these was the Montech water slope, situated in Southern France on the Canal Parallel to the Garonne (Canal Latéral à la Garonne), the canal from Toulouse to Bordeaux which most people would probably refer to as the Canal du Midi - a better-known term though strictly speaking, the Canal du Midi is only the section from Toulouse to the Mediterranean.
From what I can garner, the two-headed vehicle used on this slope is a conjoining of two Diesel railcars built by Soulé in the early 70s, running on tyres and featuring a daunting-looking shield. This shield would be lowered behind a boat, and the machine would travel up and down the slope, carrying along the boat and the water it bathed in!
However, the performance of this system is less impressive than the Inclined Plane. It bypasses 5 locks, and saves 45 minutes of travel time. That's not nothing, but if you arrived at an end and just missed the train, then going straight to the locks wasn't going to be much longer than waiting for the next one. Also, far more power is required to make this work (I'm reading 1000 hp motors, versus 125 hp for the Inclined Plane), and it's Diesel.
These photos were taken in late 2017, 8 years after the water slope closed. It was only serving leisure boats by then, and, as I've insinuated, it wasn't very economical to run. As far as I can tell, the 5 locks beside it never closed, and are in use today.
The slope and its tractor have since been renovated, and the site's current state can be seen in a Tim Traveller video published in 2021.