"If a man . . . make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." If Emerson really said that, well, he was a philosopher, not a merchant. The up-timers of Grantville may know where oil can be struck, or how to build a typewriter, but unless they know how to economically transport the oil or the typewriter to a prospective customer, they will not be able to translate their knowledge into wealth.
Transportation Modes
In 1632, there were three main methods of transporting freight:
–across open water (by sailing ship or oar-propelled galley)
–along inland waterways, i.e., rivers and canals (e.g., by barges; they were usually drawn upstream by human or animal power but could be carried downstream by the current)
–along roads (by human porters, or with pack animals, carts or wagons)
At some point, up-time technology will lead to the development of railroads, steamships, pipelines, and civilian aircraft.
Physical Infrastructure
Pre-RoF Roads. The all-weather, cemented stone-surfaced Roman roads still exist, at least in Italy and parts of southern France and Spain, but they were designed for legions on the march, not for wagons and carts.
The new paved roads were mostly in the immediate vicinity of cities and large towns. In our time line, France under Colbert "surfaced most of the main roads of France with broken stones," but in 1632, Colbert was just thirteen years old.
In northern and western England, oxen were used for plowing and heavy hauling. Since oxen can traverse soft ground, most of the width of the roads of the region were left soft, with just a narrow causeway on the side to accommodate pack animals. This was called a "pack and prime way," and it could not be used by horse-drawn wagons or coaches (Crofts, 6–7).
In contrast, in southeastern England, within the line running from the Wash to Gloucester to Weymouth, wagon traffic dominated (Crofts, 8). The ruts left by the wagons tended to make the going difficult for pack animals, and compelled the use of teams of four or even six draft beasts (Crofts 17).
Most roads, especially in less settled areas, are mere "rights of way," not prepared roadways, so it is easy for overland traffic to flow around most obstacles. The principal exceptions would be fords, bridges and mountain passes, and consequently it was at these bottlenecks that tolls were sometimes exacted.
Post-RoF Roads. The up-timers have already substantially improved the road network of southern Thuringia. By fall 1632, the "official" roads include U.S. Routes 4 (modern route B7 before it intersects B84, the "old main trade route from Frankfurt am Main to Leipzig"; DeMarce) and 26 (modern B19; DeMarce). Such roads "were invariably widened and properly graded. Graveled, too, more often than not. So the farmers were happy enough with the change. Easier on their carts and draft animals." ( 1632, Chap. 52).
Rail. A rail link to Halle is under construction as of 1633. ( 1633, Chapter 34). These are characterized, somewhat unfairly, by Quentin Underwood as "dinky wooden rails with an iron cap . . . with pathetic cargoes being pulled as often as not by 'locomotives' made up of a pickup truck—or even just a team of horses." As explained later, draft animals can pull a much heavier load on a rail line than on any normal road. The Baltimore & Ohio began operations in 1830 with similar rails and with horse-drawn cars.
By July 1633 there are trains running from Grantville to Jena and Naumberg (Cooper, "The Chase," scheduled for Ring of Fire, Volume 2). We know that the line runs all the way to Halle by June 1634 ("Until We Meet Again," Grantville Gazette, Volume 4), but the exact completion date hasn't yet been revealed.
Rivers. The principal rivers of commerce which pass through the USE are the Main (Frankfurt am Main to Wurzburg and then near Bamberg), the Weser (Bremen to the vicinity of Kassel and then near Eisenach), the Elbe (Hamburg to Magdeburg to Dresden), the Saale (a tributary of the Elbe, its mouth upstream of Magdeburg, and running to Halle, Jena, Rudolstadt, and Saalfeld), and the Oder, connecting Stettin on the Baltic to Breslau (Wroclaw). The Rhine (Rotterdam to Mainz to Switzerland) clips the extreme southwest of USE territory. All of these rivers flow north and west, into the North Sea or the Baltic Sea. The Danube, which flows south and east into the Black Sea, passes within about eighty miles of the Main, and there is a modern canal (1992) linking the two river systems, by way of Nurnberg. Some rivers were dredged to make them navigable over a greater length.
The most important rivers in the general vicinity of Grantville and Magdeburg were the Elbe and the Saale. The Elbe is Magdeburg's connection with the sea. How far up the Elbe a ship could reach depended on its draft: Hamburg (with twelve feet draft), Magdeburg (four feet), and the mouth of the Saale, near Halle (three feet). Small boats could go up the Saale as far as Naumberg. Higher up, river traffic was limited to wooden rafts. (Zander).
The navigability of a river changes over time. A river segment may be navigable one year, impassable another, depending on whether the year was wet or dry. Within a single year, the traveler may experience ice in winter, flood waters in the spring, and logjams in the summer or fall.
Canals. Navigable canals were common in the Netherlands and parts of northern Italy, rare elsewhere. (Parry, 214-5) It should be noted that the fact that a canal is available does not guarantee that the tow path is in good condition.
There are several different kinds of canals. Lateral canals run parallel to a natural waterway. Contour canals cut across the neck of a river loop. Summit-level canals bridge two river valleys.
The oldest canal, of Roman origin, is the Foss Dyke in England. Sweden has a canal (1606), with locks, joining Eskilstuna with Lake Malar. Construction of the forty lock, 55 kilometer Canal de Briare, a summit-level project, began in 1605, but in OTL, it wasn't completed until 1642. (ICML)
Germany has a summit-level canal connecting the river Elbe, Molln lake, and the river Trave, forming a navigable waterway from Lauenberg to Lubeck and the Baltic Sea. The 100 kilometer route could be traversed in 8-10 days (ICML; Hadfield 33).
Traffic frequently shifted back and forth between roads, and inland waterways (natural or artificial), depending on changes in weather conditions, tolls, and safety.
Ports. For coastal and ocean trade, there are many good harbors, with docks and other facilities, and smaller ships usually engaged in smuggling) can enter unimproved coves to transfer cargo. The Dutch shipyards of the mid-seventeenth century were able to construct ships at a cost 40-50% less than in their English counterparts, because of their efficient use of machinery (winches, cranes, etc.), and the low cost of materials (a byproduct of the Dutch dominance of shipping). (Parry, 210–11). It is unclear whether those shipyards are still in operation, given the Spanish invasion. However, the Dutch shipyard design could be copied in the USE.
Trade Routes. While German goods could be shipped down the rivers, around the Iberian peninsula, and into the Mediterranean, there were several trade routes which more directly connected Germany with northern Italy. The first was the direct overland route. We begin arbitrarily at Basel, which is on the Main river, and thus accessible to German goods. The route continued southeast to Zurich, then south to Lucerne, went over the St. Gotthard Pass, and finally reached Milan. This alpine route may have been adversely affected by the Little Ice Age, which caused the glaciers to advance. (Parry, 186)
There were three other routes. One also began at Basel, but skirted the mountains by passing through Chalons and Lyons and then descending the Rhone. (Samhaber, 143) Another major transit was much more roundabout (about three times as long as the direct one), but had the advantage that some of the travel was on rivers. It went through the Low Countries to Paris, then along the Seine and the Rhone to southern France, and finally east into Italy. (Kohn I) Finally, there was the route from Erfurt (Thuringia), through Nurnberg and Augsberg (Bavaria), over the Brenner Pass, and onward to the Italian towns of Bolzano, Trento, Verona and Venice. (Parry, 185).
Germany was also linked, albeit tenuously, to Asia, by the land routes Magdeburg-Leipzig-Breslau-Krakow–Lemberg (Lvov)-Akerman, and Nurnberg-Regensburg-Passau-Vienna-Buda/Pest-Belgrade-Constantinople. (Tuma, Fig. 6.1; Samhaber 140–1, 153–154).
Social Infrastructure
The social infrastructure of early seventeenth-century commerce was surprisingly sophisticated. Most merchants didn't own their own ships or barges. Instead, they relied on common carriers—specialized transportation services—to carry goods for them.
Innkeepers were key players in the intra-European transport network. Once goods landed at a port, and cleared customs, they were delivered to a local innkeeper. He or she then arranged for them to be shipped to an inn closer to the final destination. There, the recipient innkeeper arranged for the next leg of the journey, and so forth, until the cargo finally reached the end point and was picked up by the merchant's factor. The arrangements made by the innkeepers included hiring carriers, paying tolls, and, sometimes, arranging financing.
By the 1540s, the long-distance overland trade among Belgium, Germany and Italy was dominated by "about half a dozen firms, the largest being from Milan, with others from Genoa, Germany, and Lorraine." (Kohn I, p. 45) Braudel mentions the existence of transporters in Ratisbon, Ulm, Augsburg, Coire and Basle (II, 354). There were also common carriers in England. The main role of these firms was that they made the arrangements for the entire trip, and quoted an all-inclusive price, so the merchant didn't have to deal with a host of innkeepers. They thus were more analogous to a modern freight forwarder than to a trucking company.
There were also itinerant carters in Germany, who traveled about looking for business. Inns acted as commission agents for these entrepreneurs, too. (Braudel II, 353). For short hauls, peasant carts could be hired for a pittance if it didn't interfere with the agricultural routine. (Braudel II).
The Spanish, Portuguese and Venetian ships published regular shipping schedules, encouraging merchants to get their goods to port at a particular time, allowing the ships to fill quickly. The Genoese used a hub-and-spoke system, with small ships carrying goods to and from the periphery, and large ships handling the higher volume inter-hub traffic. Finally, the Dutch came up with the notion of having shipowners sell some or all of their cargo capacity to "charterer's houses." This transferred the risk of finding a cargo from the shipowner to the charterer. Merchants, in turn, could find cargo space more quickly, by "one stop shopping" at the local charterer's house, rather than by walking the docks in search of an accommodating ship.
By the publication of Sir John Taylor's Carrier's Cosmography (1637), the English long distance wagon trade had regular schedules (Crofts 43), and I think it likely that the well-developed system he described was in place by the time of the RoF. A carrier could further diminish waiting time by using the post to warn customers of its impending arrival. This was usually done by "footpost," who were trained long-distance runners. (Use of post-riders was then too expensive for routine business correspondence; the British post office, an offshoot of the official communication system, wasn't established until 1635, see Crofts, 51–54).
The Risk of Loss
One significant gap in the social infrastructure is that it has failed to suppress bandits and pirates. The cargo, the vehicles (animate or inanimate), and (in the case of the Barbary corsairs) even the crew were vulnerable to seizure.
In the seventeenth century, the rate of loss of sailing ships was 10–30% a year (Kohn I, p. 23). The losses could be the result of nature (storms and shoals), or piracy. The Baltic was free of pirates, but the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and certain Asian waters were hotbeds of buccaneering. In 1620–23, out of "thirty four ships sailing from Lisbon or Goa, eight were wrecked, two captured, and nine forced to return to harbor." (Parry, 195). Portuguese losses in the Asian trade were estimated as occurring in one in five sailings during the period 1550-1650 (Id.)
One method of protecting one's self was to take out insurance. A typical premium was 18–20% (Kohn I, p. 32), so this was usually resorted to only in the case of cargoes with a high profit potential.
An alternative to insurance was to diversify the risk. You split your cargo among several ships, hoping that some at least would reach their destination. You sold shares (usually one share for each crewman, for a total of 16 to 70) in your cargo to other merchants, and you bought shares in other voyages from them in turn. (Kohn I, p. 28)
In 1591, a Dutch merchant sent thirty ships to Italy; "God was the insurer." The result? "Two foundered and ten were seized en route, although some of these were eventually recovered." (Kohn I, p. 32). This not only shows how high the rate of predation was in the Mediterranean at the time, but also illustrates how use of several ships can save you from losing your entire investment.
You could increase security by arming your ships. Of course, that meant that capacity and capital which could otherwise be invested in cargo was diverted to cannon, shot, powder and gunners. A long distance trader was more likely to be armed than a coaster in the pirate-free Baltic (although, in the 1632 universe, the Baltic is not peaceful).
A compromise was the convoy system, in which several unarmed or lightly armed vehicles traveled together with a common, heavily armed escort. This system usually worked well at sea; in 1782, insurance rates were 20% for unescorted ships and 12% for those in a convoy (Armstrong, 55). However, it was not a panacea, because the convoy was also a juicier target. English and Dutch privateers flocked to attack the Spanish gold fleets.
In 1645, during the English Civil War, a wagon convoy, carrying cloth valued at 10,000 pounds, with a 80 man escort, was successfully ambushed by 200 cavalry sent out by the Earl of Northampton (Crofts 45). Consequently, the carriers adjusted to the wartime conditions by presenting a "scattered target" (Crofts 46–7).
Pre-RoF Transport Vehicles
Characters in 1632 can acquire their own "vehicles" (from mules to sailing ships), or hire others to ship goods for them. Carrying capacity and speed estimates are given in Table 1. For purchase prices and rental costs, see the Transportation System Addendum.
Draft and pack animals. Pack animals carry the cargo in panniers, one on each side. Draft animals pull some kind of passive cargo-bearing vehicle, such as a cart, wagon, or sleigh.
Insofar as land travel was concerned, carts and wagons were used mostly in local and regional trade. While their carrying capacity was greater than that of pack animals (mules, donkeys, horses, and, in the desert, camels), they were slower, and less able to negotiate rough terrain. Long-distance travelers were more likely to have to cross regions without good roads, and also more likely to face bandits or armies (the distinction can be a fine one). They would find it inconvenient if they were unable to move off-road when it is prudent to do so. Hence, long-distance overland traffic was heavily reliant on pack animals.
The premier pack animals are mules and donkeys. Horses are more expensive, more finicky, and more vulnerable to disease and accident, and hence they are more likely to be used as riding horses by the merchants and guards, than as pack animals.
In general, animals can pull a greater load than what they can carry directly. A light horse can carry 200–300 pounds, but could draw a 1,000-pound laden cart.
Where roads are good enough to permit the use of wheeled transport, you are likely to see mules, donkeys and oxen drawing wagons. The wagons which engaged in long-distance carriage were called "long wagons" in England, and they seem to have appeared by 1567 (Crofts 7).
Oxen are immensely strong; they can pull 150% of their own weight. Ox had other advantages; they were less subject to disease, they were less likely to be stolen, and they made a good meal if food became more important than transportation. And they were cheap. Their big disadvantage was their slow speed (1 mph).
If the travelers are going outside the area where they can stay at inns each night, part of the load will be provisions for the humans, even if they intend to let the animals graze.
Coaches were first used to transport those who could not ride themselves by reason of age, infirmity, or modesty. By Elizabethan times, town coaches had become popular, as much as a status symbol as for the practical service they rendered.
By the time of the RoF, there were at least a few stage coaches serving the British public For example, in 1629, you could take a stage coach between London and Cambridge (Crofts 125). The term "stage" implies that they had regular routes. Long-distance stage coach service was acutely dependent on the adequacy of the roads. They were typically pulled by four or six horses, and carried six or eight passengers.
For more information on coaches and wagons, see Bergstralh, "Adventures in Transport," this issue.
Finally, there were boats and ships, ranging in size from wherries to the Manila galleons. Which brings us to the issue of carrying capacity.
Carrying Capacity
A quantum leap in carrying capacity was achieved when you left dry land. According to Kohn, a river boat could carry as much as 400 mules (forty tons). The maximum size of the boat actually depends on the river conditions. On most British rivers, the barges were at most twenty to forty tons (Willan 97), but on the Thames, barges eventually reached a size of 250 tons (Sailing Barge Ass'n). On the Elbe-Lubeck canal, the standard size boat was 19 meters by 3.25 meters, and carries 12.5 tons. (Hadfield 33). The largest Russian barges were 150–170 tons (Hadfield 56).
Of course, ships are much more expensive than mules or carts, and so purchasing one makes sense only if you are regularly moving large cargoes. Indeed, large ships were usually built, to order, for a group of merchants, each thereby acquiring a share in the ship. (Kohn I, p. 29).
The typical size of a sailing ship depended on circumstances. Small ships could use shallower waters, narrower straits, and smaller harbors. They could find full cargoes faster, and could be loaded or unloaded quickly. On the other hand, large ships had lower manning ratios (Brautaset), and were less vulnerable to small craft attack, less likely to founder in storms, and more hydrodynamically efficient.
In general, the size of the ship dictated whether it specialized in short, medium or long distance trade. For Bristol vessels operating 1539–46, only one, the 255 ton Saviour, carried goods to the Levant. The ships primarily with France and Spain were 30–135 tons, median 90 (Evan 19–20). The largest engaged exclusively in the (local) Irish trade was 25 tons.
Kohn says that in the seventeenth century, the "typical" English ship trading to Spain was twenty to forty tons. (Kohn I, p. 25). But the Red Dragon, sent in 1601 to the faraway spiceries of Asia, was 600 tons (Milton 73).
Propulsive Force, Resistance and Energy
To move forward, a vehicle must overcome opposing forces: surface friction, hydrodynamic or aerodynamic drag, and (if it moves upward) gravity.
The less these opposing forces, the less effort is required to move a given load. That's important, because there are limits to how much pull can be exerted by an animal or an inanimate powered vehicle.
So friction is important. If the cargo is on a sledge, the load (including vehicle weight) can be 50% of a draft horse's weight; if it is on a wheeled vehicle with a good road beneath it, the load can be 100%; if it is a car on a rail track, 1000% (keep that in mind when considering the evolution of USE's railroads), and finally, if it is towing a barge, a magnificent 6500% (HNC)
As it moves, the vehicle expends energy, and the greater the resistive forces, the more energy is used up in moving a given distance.
That energy, in turn, has to come from somewhere. Sailing ships, of course, capture the free energy of wind and current, but their courses are in turn constrained by the movement patterns of the air and water.
Most other vehicles must use chemical energy, carefully collected in the form of food for animals, or fuel (wood, coal or oil) for engines, and convert it as efficiently as possible into the energy of motion.
The greater the friction or drag, the less distance which can be covered as a result of the consumption of a given quantity of fuel. Or, in traveling a given distance, the more fuel is consumed. Which increases the cost of carriage.
From Road to Rail
The engineering purpose of a road to allow a vehicle to carry an increased load, or move at a greater speed, than it could over unimproved ground. It accomplishes this purpose by providing a smooth, low-friction surface.
The wider the road surface, the greater the cost of construction, and so one can build a roadway more cheaply if the vehicles can somehow be constrained so that their wheels follow a particular track. Then only the trackway need have a fancy, expensive surface. While the trackway could be set level with the ground, the vehicles then escape the track too easily. The first solution, found in ancient times, was to cut grooves to receive the wheels. Unfortunately, these grooves, outdoors, easily filled with water and dust, thereby defeating their purpose.
In the mines of pre-modern Europe, particularly heavy loads had to be moved, which provided the incentive to find a better solution. This was to raise, rather than lower, the track; the tracks became rails. However, while this allowed water to runoff, the wheels could also slip away to one side or another. Hence, a flange had to be attached, either to the rails or to the wheels, to prevent derailment.
Flanging the rails meant that an ordinary cart, of appropriate axle length, could be run. However, as the track length increased, it meant that a considerable amount of material had to be invested in the flange. Flanging the wheels meant that the vehicle was dedicated to rail movement, but the flange investment was then determined by the amount of rolling stock rather than the length of track.
One also had the choice of flanging the outside or inside edge of the wheel (or rail). However, if the flange is on the inside edge, a sidewise push tends to rotate the car so that the flange bears down on the rail; while if the flange is on the outside edge, a similar push lifts the flange away, defeating its purpose.
Eighteenth-century collieries explored all of these options (NOCK/D, 105). However, modern railroads use inside edge-flanged wheels (Armstrong, 4).
Double-flanged wheels are used on some alpine funicular railways, and on temporary logging "railroads" in which the rails are stripped-down tree logs.
The Train Principle
A train, in essence, is a series of vehicles coupled together so a few (usually just one) provides guidance, or motive power, to all of the others. A string of pack mules, led by a "bell mule," is one kind of train. Wagons can be lashed together into a true "wagon train" and hauled by a single team of draft animals. A line of barges, with a steam-powered boat pushing or pulling the others, is also a train. But the epitome of the train principle is the railroad train, in which one or more locomotives pulls (or, occasionally, pushes) unpowered cars.
Why did the train principle become dominant on railways? The reasons include ease of maintenance, ease of replacement (after breakdown or obsolescence) of motive power, efficiency ("idle trains do not waste expensive motive power resources") and safety are all factors ("Locomotives," Wikipedia). Clearly, the crew requirements are less, too.
But perhaps the most important reason for operating trains is that it allows for a much higher traffic density. The spacing between the individual cars on a train is just a matter of inches, at most, feet. While the distance which must be maintained between one train and the next increases to some degree as the length of the train increases, the net result is that there can be more cars per hour per track if they are part of a long train, than if they were independently operated. One industry source (Armstrong, 5) gives these figures for trains traveling at 60 mph:
1 car trains, stopping distance 800 feet, cars per hour 365
4 car trains, stopping distance 1,000 feet, cars per hour 945
80 car trains, stopping distance 3,000 feet, cars per hour 2,535
Cost of Carriage
The basic cost of transportation is what some scholars call the cost of carriage: the rental cost (or amortized purchase cost) of the vehicle, plus the cost of hiring and feeding the necessary muleteers, carters or sailors, and any draft or pack animals, for the duration of the journey.
In general, it is cheaper to ship goods by river barge than on pack animals or wagons. Economic historians have estimated that "carriage by road was . . . 4 to 12 times more expensive than carriage by inland waterway." (Kohn I, p. 50; Emerson, 254) The rates were higher on the smaller rivers, or on the upper reaches of large ones, but still were usually less than half the overland rates. (Willan, 121). However, bear in mind that the historians are referring to the pure cost of carriage, which ignores tolls.
Maritime traffic offered the lowest possible cost of carriage, (from 8 to 20 times cheaper, for the same mileage, than using the roads, and thus about twice as cheap as the river and canal traffic)(Kohn I, p. 50). However, since ships were the largest capacity transports, they were most suitable for large volume traders who could fill them in one fell swoop, and thus not be dependent on the gradual accretion of cargo.
Predation Costs
To that cost of carriage, we must add the direct and indirect costs of legal and illegal "predation." Legal predation includes paying lawful tolls for using a bridge, mountain pass, harbor, or strait, or having a ship taken by a privateer, or one holding a "letter of reprisal." Illegal predation includes being robbed, charged "protection money" or forced to sell at below-market prices by roving armies, local lords, bandits and pirates.
The following example shows the significance of such costs. "The cost of grain at the farm gate in sixteenth-century Sicily was 10 Spanish reales per fanega [about 44 kilograms]. Carriage by land to the nearest port cost 3 reales and carriage by sea to Spain another 3.5, for a total cost of carriage of 6.5 reales. The cost of predation included 5 reales per fanega for an export license (tolls) and 1 real for insurance (a measure of the cost of piracy), for a total of 6 reales." (Kohn I, p. 52)
Tolls continued to be onerous in later times. The actual carriage cost for transporting coal from London to Wallingford (60 miles) in the 1630s was five shillings a ton; tolls tripled the price (Willan). Around 1807, a barge carrying fifty tons from Newcastle to Frenchtown had a carriage cost of $3, but paid $25 in tolls. (Meyer 81).
The direct costs are the actual tolls or thefts; the indirect costs are those of defense (hiring guards, mounting cannon, etc.), avoidance (delaying departure in order to travel in a convoy, taking a slower, more roundabout route to avoid tolls or pirates), and minimizing the value at risk (smaller ships and cargos, paying insurance premiums).
A typical crew requirement for an unarmed merchant ship was one sailor for every ten tons of cargo capacity. If a seventeenth-century merchant ship carried one gun (cannon) for every ten tons of cargo, and a gun required two additional crewmen to operate, then that would triple its wage bill.
In general, the costs of predation are much more variable than the costs of carriage. For example, one study looked at the effect of war and piracy on the (wholesale price index-deflated) cost of shipping wine from Bordeaux to London. The index was set at 100 for 1395–1405. It reached a low of 30 during the relatively peaceful period 1315–1330, while in the 1380s (during the Hundred Years' War) it rose to 190. (Kohn I, citing Menard, 1991). On merchant ships in 1700–1750, wages were 28% higher for officers, and 52% higher for the crewmen, in war than in peace (Rediker, 306). Overall shipping costs were anywhere from 40% (coal from Hull to London) to 200% higher (tobacco from Virginia to England)(Olsen 172).
Riparian traffic was especially subject to tolls. While overland traffic, especially mules, could skirt around many roadway checkpoints by taking more primitive trails or even cutting across open countryside, the barges had to stay in the waterway, for good or ill. In consequence, it could be worth resorting to mules after all.
"On the Seine in the late fifteenth century, tolls added 50% to the price of grain over a distance of 200 miles, and between Rouen and Chartres they doubled the price of salt." (Kohn I, p. 10). As a result, "much of the grain trade that had been carried by boat on the Seine was by 1500 being carried by wagon instead."(Kohn I, p. 15).
In 1500, on the Rhine, there were sixty separate tolls (Kohn I, p. 10). Even a modest toll, exacted sixty times, can be a considerable financial burden. "It was largely the burden of tolls on the Rhine that led the merchants of Cologne to develop an alternative overland route to the Low Countries in the fifteenth century." (Kohn I, p. 15).
While you didn't have to worry about toll stations in the open ocean, piracy was definitely a problem in the seventeenth century. The basic problem is that the courses of ships are constrained by the winds, the currents, and the distribution of straits, good harbors, and the buyers and sellers of the goods they carry. Pirates could lie in wait outside a harbor, in narrow passages (such as the notorious Straits of Florida), or even just along the "best course" from Cadiz to the West Indies.
Once civilian aircraft are introduced they will be less vulnerable to predation than ocean vessels. There is really no equivalent to straits, unless the route requires flying over a mountain range and the aircraft is forced to fly along a mountain pass. Suitable sites for airports are much easier to find than good harbors, so if the landing charges become onerous, you can find yourself a cheaper airport site. And piracy (other than hijacking) is quite difficult.
Forecasting Transportation Costs
One of the purposes of this article is to make it easier for authors of stories set in the 1632 universe to figure out what a reasonable transportation cost for sending their widgets from point A to point B might be. Trouble is, even if you have access to seventeenth-century merchants' journals, and can read early modern German (or whatever), they aren't going to have an entry which is exactly in point. So I have tried to develop a more general approach which can provide a plausible number for any plausible combination of goods, route, and mode of transportation.
Even for the most expensive sort of down-time vehicle—a sailing ship—the cost of carriage was primarily the labor cost. Kohn reports that "the wage bill of a Genoese ship sailing to Chios in the fifteenth century was some 4,500 lire while the ship itself was worth less than 5,000"; if the ship were good for perhaps ten such voyages, its "amortized cost" per voyage would be perhaps 500 lire. (Kohn I, p. 15). Braudel says that in the ocean trade, in 1707, the total of rations and pay was about twice the fixed costs (Braudel II, 369–71).
The total wages paid would be proportional to the time spent in transit, and therefore, usually, to the distance traversed. We can compare movement of different goods on different routes by assuming, as a first approximation, that the cost of transport is proportional to the distance covered, and the weight or volume (more on that later) of the goods, and characteristic of the mode of transport chosen (ships, barges, mules, etc.). The standard measure in most economic history literature is the ton-mile, the cost of transporting a ton of goods a distance of one mile.
Once you have the cost of the contemplated form of transportation expressed on a unit (ton-mile) basis, you can figure out the total cost for any cargo, and any route, which uses comparable means. You just need to be able to determine the effective freight tonnage of the cargo (usually its weight, including packing materials and containers, but sometimes adjusted for volume as explained below), and the length of the route (which is not necessarily a straight line), and multiply the unit cost by these two factors.
While it is convenient to work with costs per ton-mile in order to compare data for different goods, routes, and time periods, the merchant is concerned with the total cost of moving the goods from source to market. Hence, a circuitous seaborne route may actually be more expensive, in toto, than one which plods across terra firma.
The Ton-Mile Method in Action
Based on analysis of a great deal of data (see the Transportation System Addendum), I have come up with ballpark figures for the ton mile rate of various down-time modes of transportation (see Table 2 below). Now let's see how to use those rates.
Example 1: Shipping sewing machines from Eisenach to Hanover. One option is send it overland, which is 110 miles. The road is unimproved, so we would want to use a pack animal train. The sewing machine, in its packed form, weighs perhaps eighty pounds. A mule could readily carry two of them, one on each side. The cost of carriage would be (110 miles) X (10d / long ton-mile) = 1100d (92s; New US$1925) per long ton, and, for one machine, New US$1925 X (80 pounds/2240 pounds per long ton)=New US$69. Transit time is likely to be around seven days.
The other option is to take advantage of the river. It is a longer route (150 miles by water and 35 miles by land). The transit time is perhaps 17 days. The rate calculation is (150 miles) X (1d / long ton-mile) =150d, + (35 miles) X (10d / long ton-mile)=350d, 150d+350d=500d (New US$875) per long ton; and for one 80 pound machine, New US$31.
That assumes that there are no tolls on the river. Tolls can easily double or triple the shipping cost, which would tend to favor the overland route.
Example 2: Shipping ten long tons of Castilla rubber from Central America to a European port, 4,000 miles. (4,000 miles) X (0.1d/ long ton mile) = 400d (New US$700) per long ton, hence 4000d (New US$7000) for the whole shipment. The carriage cost is New US$3.13/pound.
Cost and Price
Bear in mind that if the characters in the story are hiring someone else to transport their goods, the price they pay is going to be higher than the cost to the carrier. That difference will be the carrier's profit, and the profit margin is going to depend on a variety of factors, including the amount of competition on the route in question, and the value per weight of the goods being moved (the pricier they are, the easier it is for the shipper to accept a high transport cost).
The alternative to paying freight charges to a carter or shipowner is to buy (or rent) a suitable vehicle and transport your own goods. The analysis of the costs involved is included in the Addendum. In general, you can probably save 50–75% of the transportation costs by eliminating the middleman (See, e.g., Duncan 49).
Sailing ships have a high carrying efficiency (load per dollar and load per crewman) but also a high absolute price. Thus, characters in the 1632 novels are not likely to buy a ship unless they need to move ten tons or more in a single shipment. Aircraft and railroads, of course, are even more expensive. In fact, in 2000, airlines leased, rather than owned, more than half of their fleet (Harris 26).
While leasing is certainly convenient, it is doubtful whether, in the immediate post-RoF period, it will be available for "big ticket" items like ships, locomotives and aircraft.
Weight and Volume
To a carrier, a ton of feathers is more bother than a ton of lead, since, for the same weight, it takes up more space in the hold, thus diminishing the ability to carry other cargoes. So, they charge more (surprise).
To the Spanish and French, the standard cargo was wine, and hence the "burthen" (carrying capacity) of a ship was originally measured in those terms, resulting in a "tonelada" or "tonneau" being the equivalent of a volume of 40–60 cu. ft., depending on how much allowance was made for the casks and the waste space of the ship. In the Baltic, the standard cargo was grain, resulting in a "tunnage" of 120 to 200 cu. ft. per long ton.
While the shipowners usually want to use a high volume equivalency, so they could charge more for a cargo, once governments levied fees (tolls, port fees, taxes, etc.) based on tonnage, the use of a higher cu. ft. number per ton was to the mariner's advantage. This led to the adoption of a second tonnage measurement, known as the "register ton," whose internationally accepted value is 100 cu. ft. (The British government adopted this value in 1628, at least for the purpose of deciding how to compensate a shipowner if his craft were appropriated for conversion into a warship.)
However, the volume equivalent used to calculating ocean shipping charges remains the "shipping ton" or "freight ton," usually given the value of 40 cu. ft. (Parry, 218–19; Marshall, 97–98). The shipping cost of any product with a specific gravity less than about 1.18 (the ratio of 40 cubic feet to the volume of one long ton of pure water) will be determined by its volume, not by its weight.
Pack horse and wagon carriers charged one-quarter to one-half more for light or bulky goods (Albert 175). Nineteenth-century railroads likewise distinguished between "weight goods" (charged per hundredweight or per ton) and "measurement goods" (charged per cubic foot).
Seasonality
The weather affects the ease with which goods can be transported. European traffic slows in the winter. Alpine passes are closed by snow, and rivers and lakes by ice. In southern Russia, the waterways were open nine months of the year, but in the north, they could be used by boats for only a mere six weeks. On the other hand, on land, it was sometimes easier to move goods by winter; animal-drawn sleds were used. (Landes, 247).
The English experience is probably typical of what the USE can expect. Bogart reports that in 1730–39, the average winter carriage rate on turnpikes was 52% higher than the summer rates. Road improvements gradually narrowed the winter-summer rate differential, until, in 1800–09, it was only 4%. (Bogart Table 9, see also Albert 175).
Other Cost Factors
Shipment Size. Large shipments are generally less expensive than small ones. They can take best advantage of large capacity, fuel efficient vehicles. A ten pound parcel might be transported at a rate of $1,000 a ton, whereas a 1000 pound LTL truck shipment is charged one-third that, and a 100,000 pound rail car load is transported for one-thirtieth of the parcel price. (GEO545).
Ballast. In some markets, the principal cargo was light (low density), and, to maintain the proper trim (so it didn't capsize), a ship had to carry ballast if it couldn't find compensatory cargo. Ships bringing cotton from the Levant (Near East) to Northern Italy offered special prices to attract the desired "trim" cargoes; spices traveled at half unit cost (relative to cotton) and heavy bulk goods (potash, salt and alum) at one-quarter unit cost.
Administration. A large single shipment is likely to get a better deal than many small ones, because of reduced administrative costs. A regular customer will do better than an occasional one.
If you are shipping goods which are fragile or perishable, you probably will have to pay for increased care in handling them, or for greater speed in transit.
Differential Pricing. The carrier may charge a higher rate for luxury goods than for bulk goods of low unit value. Moreover, the price may depend on the customer, with a nobleman being charged more than a commoner (but possibly also getting better service, too).
Sometimes there is an explicit attempt to differentiate the transport services provided: first and second class seats on trains; regular and steerage accommodations on ships; business and coach seats on airplanes. This occurred at least as early as the eighteenth century (inside and outside passengers on coaches).
Goods Value and Trading Distance
Shipping charges were a function of the cargo size and volume, and the distance traveled, not (usually) of the value of the cargo. Hence, for high revenue goods, even overland transportation costs were a relatively low percentage of the original cost. Thus, the tendency was to use ships for transporting bulk commodities(low value relative to weight or volume), and pack animals for handling the priciest goods, at least when both seaborne and overland routes were feasible. "In times of peace, trade between the two zones of Europe in luxury goods and manufactures—principally, silks, spices and woolen cloth—was carried overland between Northern Italy and the Low Countries. For goods such as these, the cost of carriage by road was modest." (Kohn I, p. 51). The same was true of other manufactured goods, such as south German firearms and armor (Parry, 163). On the other hand, grain, timber, and coal moved only short distances, ten to twenty miles, by road, and otherwise were shipped by barges and coasters. (Parry, 156–7, 178). Wine, although higher in value, also traveled by water, both because of its bulk and because it traveled better in casks than in goatskins. (Parry, 183).
Intrinsic and Effective Speed
Intrinsic speed is that which can be maintained without resting. Effective long-term speed takes necessary rests into account. For multi-day journeys, it is effective speed which counts.
Travel on poor or bandit-infested roads is mostly limited to daylight hours. If the animals need to forage, that further reduces the road time.
As roads improve, some night travel will be possible. Even in eighteenth-century America, stagecoaches in the east left as early as one in the morning, and arrived at their destination as late as midnight. A few mail coaches traveled all night (Holmes 26, 36).
Night travel requires some illumination, whether that be moonlight, a lantern held by the driver's companion, or a headlight. (Street lights just aren't happening, outside of cities.)
Prolonged travel, of course, requires changing the animals and, more occasionally, the drivers.
Not only do cars and trucks have higher intrinsic speeds than horses (given adequate roads), they have even higher effective speeds, because they don't tire. Still, to travel all night and day, they would need several shifts of drivers. Eventually, of course, you would need to stop to take on food and water for the crew, and refuel your vehicle.
Trains are faster still and can travel 24 hours a day (assuming crew shifts, which are easier to justify given the greater cargo capacity of a train). It is also possible to resupply a steam locomotive with water while it is still moving.
Boats, like trains, can travel nonstop. This is safest, of course, in the open sea, far from navigational hazards, and with good weather. But if river conditions permitted, barges heading downstream were kept moving after sunset.
The situation of aircraft is somewhat analogous to that of trains and boats; that is, they can carry crews large enough to operate the aircraft nonstop. However, fuel consumption imposes a practical limit on how long their very high intrinsic speeds can be maintained.
Riding Post. Even pre-RoF, in special circumstances, effective speeds overland could be greater than those at sea. Elizabethan England had a system of post horses, originally available just to government couriers, but later opened to private parties. The posts were usually ten miles apart, and the rider changed horses at each post. At one point there were three systems, the Royal Post, the Merchant Adventurers' Post, and the "Strangers" Post (Walker 50-1).
There were post systems in France, and in the Holy Roman Empire, too. (Crofts 61). According to Braudel, "it was possible, if one was prepared to pay, to have an order taken from Nuremberg to Venice in four days at the beginning of the sixteenth century (Singman, 318)."
The post system was geared to the rapid transport of couriers carrying messages and small packages; it couldn't be used for heavy or bulky goods, and it was extremely expensive. It is best to think of it as the seventeenth century equivalent of an air courier service. Still, it is conceivable that the USE could establish a post system. It doesn't require new technology, just a willingness to make the investment in the post stations and their horses.
Long wagon and stagecoach lines also made use of post stations to expedite traffic.
Vehicle Productivity
A common measure of vehicle productivity (revenue-generating potential) is potential payload times effective speed (OTA). That is because a faster vehicle can make more trips in a given time. Aircraft have a payload (passenger and cargo weight) which is small relative to its total "useful load" (which further includes crew, equipment, provisions, and fuel). The 1934 Sikorsky S-42 had a useful load of 18,236 pounds, but after subtracting equipment (2,181), crew (1,000), and fuel (6,692), the payload was 8,363 pounds (Sikorsky). Payload can be increased, but at the expense of range.
Wait Time and Load Factor
The problem with ships was that they carried so much cargo, that they were hard to fill quickly. According to Ewan Jones, the average length of five mid-sixteenth century round-trip voyages from Bristol to Bourdeaux was 97 days, even though the round-trip sailing time was just twenty days. So the other 77 days were spent waiting for one hundred tons or so of freight. The problem was even more acute over the Bristol to Iberia route; the average length of six voyages was 153 days, while the round-trip sailing time was forty, implying a wait time of 113 days.
A ship which left early, with half a load, was operating at half-efficiency; it would have to charge twice as much per ton of cargo to earn the same revenue.
The problem of waiting for cargo, while most acute for ships, was also experienced by wagoners. A carrier traveling from Westchester to London (120 miles) was eight days on the road, but had to dawdle for two days in the expensive capital, waiting for custom, before he could return.
If your cargo would fill a ship which is empty or only part full, you can get a better deal than if your cargo does not substantially affect the departure date. A similar phenomenon is seen today in the trucking and rail industries; you pay a higher rate for less-than-truckload or less-than-carload shipments. Also, as planes fill, you pay more for the remaining seats.
The extreme example of this phenomenon is when trade is principally in one direction. If a ship routinely returns empty ("deadhaul"), it has to double its freight charges (cp. Meyer 81.) If you can provide a back cargo to a skipper in need of one, you can probably negotiate a lower ton-mile cost than that paid by the original trader.
Delivery Time
In theory, maritime transportation was the fastest. "In good conditions, ships could cover 60 to 100 miles a day; carts and pack animals could manage 15 to 25; and riverboats and barges perhaps 10." (Kohn I, 50–51) Traveling from England to the New World took 1–2 months (Singman 89) and, of course, was only possible by sea.
However, the nominal speed advantage of sailing ships was misleading. First of all, the ocean route might be several times longer than the overland route; compare, for example, Hamburg to Venice. "The distance between Venice and Bruges or
Antwerp by sea was roughly five times the distance by land." (Kohn I, p. 51).
Secondly, oceangoing vessels were more dependent on weather, and might have to sit out storms in port, or veer far off course to avoid one at sea, thus losing more time. Nor could the vessels of the day sail close to the wind.
Finally, a ship captain usually could not afford to travel with a lightly laden ship and thus, unless your cargo was large enough to fill the ship, or you could afford the cost of a charter, you had to wait until the captain received enough cargo from others to justify setting sail. Overland departures were therefore more frequent.
Alternatively, the problem of obtaining sufficient cargo could result in longer shipping times, as desperate shipowners would taken on cargoes which forced them to make side trips.
For these reasons, it could actually be faster to move goods over the overland route, even though ships were speedier than pack animals.
Speed and Direction
There is a favored direction for water and air travel.
Ocean travel. In the oceans, the prevailing winds and currents, and their seasonal variations, dictated the general flow of commerce. The best route around the Horn of Africa required sailing west to Brazil, down the South American coast, and then back to the East. The seasonal monsoon winds dictated the pattern of trade in the Indian Ocean.
Generally speaking, long outbound and return voyages were of different lengths. The voyage from Acapulco to Manila was just three months, but the return trip required six to eight months (Braudel 312).
River travel. Riparian travelers are more dependent on current than seafarers. On a river, the current carries you downstream, but retards your return trip. The vessel must be sailed, rowed, poled, towed, bow-hauled or warped upstream. (In "bow-hauling," a cable attached at one end to the bow is wrapped around a sturdy tree upstream. The free end is held by the crew, who haul upon it, hopefully advancing the boat toward the tree. In warping, "anchor boats" drop anchor ahead of the barge and then haul on a cable to bring the main craft forward.) Hauling could be done by men, animals, shore-based steam engines, or steamboats. (Hadfield 90-2). The term "hauling," as used by watermen, includes pushing as well as pulling, and in the nineteenth century it was discovered that a steamboat could efficiently propel a train of barges ahead of it.
Prior to steam power, the trip down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, took one month, but the trip upstream necessitated up to four months. (Meyer, 96).
Steamboats. Steamboats are not only faster than sailing ships, they are independent of the wind. Hence, the traditional directional differences were muted by the steam navigation. In 1820, steamboats reduced the average length of the against-the-current New Orleans-Pittsburgh run from 100 to 30 days. (Meyer 107).
Air travel. Air speed and fuel costs are seriously affected by headwinds and tailwinds.
Speed and Money
All else being equal, a faster vehicle is better. First, your exposure to risks of travel (disease, warfare, piracy) is reduced. The longer the voyage, the more crew was lost to illness or accident. Scurvy was a noteworthy killer on long-distance cruises. Longer trips also increased the chance that the travelers would run afoul of brigands or armies on land, or foreign navies, privateers, or pirates at sea. Higher speed meant that if you sighted a potential enemy, you were more likely to be able to make good your escape.
Carriers can make more trips each year, thereby increasing your revenue. A 200 ton ship making two trips a year can transport, at most 800 tons of cargo annually. If you could squeeze a third trip in (and the demand exists to fill the ship again), you could increase its revenue 50%.
With fast transport, merchants can more readily take advantage of fluctuations in supply and demand. Temporary shortages (e.g., famines caused by harvest failures) created opportunities for profit, but mostly for those who brought the goods into harbor first. Perishable goods would fetch a better price if they had spent less time in transit.
Finally, merchants can reduce your financing and "opportunity costs." Money is tied up in the goods until they are sold.
The benefits of speed are even more pronounced in passenger service (Slack). By the eighteenth century, "fly coach" service was attracting customers in England despite its arduous nature.
Short Hauls and Long Hauls
The reason that our basic method of forecasting the total transportation cost for a particular transport mode works reasonably well is that many of the underlying costs are based, directly or indirectly, on the distance traveled. One example, daily wages has already been mentioned. If you want to split hairs, wages are a function of time, not distance. But if the speed on the route is constant, then there is a proportionality between the distance traveled and the time spent. The same is true of room and board for the crew. River tolls tend to accumulate, more or less linearly, with the distance traversed. For engine-driven vehicles, fuel consumption is also based, mostly, on distance, although some fuel is burnt when idling, and speed affects fuel efficiency.
Long distance transportation costs could be pushed up by a number of factors. As you travel out of your own country, the risk of predation, legal and illegal, increases; as a foreigner, you are considered "fair game." You are also less likely to be familiar with army movements, bandit haunts, etc.
While predation costs are higher for long-distance travel, long-distance carriage costs are lower
For example, "it cost 25–33 soldi to carry a cantar of cotton from Chios to Barbary, but only 40–44 soldi to carry it to Flanders, perhaps three times the distance." (Kohn I, p. 18). In the mid-sixteenth century, the price of carrying wine from Spain to Bristol was only 25% higher than that of transporting it from Bordeaux, even though the sailing distance and time was twice as great (Jones I, 15-16).
The principal reason why short hauls are expensive is that carriers have fixed costs and their fares must cover those costs.
Fixed and Variable Costs
According to economic theory, transport costs can be subdivided into two basic components:
variable costs (which are directly proportionate to the length or duration of the journey)
fixed costs (which are independent of the length or duration of the journey).
The variable costs include the fuel (wood, coal, gas, oil, etc.) for inanimate vehicles (locomotives, steamships, airplanes), and feed and stable fees for draft or pack animals when on the road. They include maintenance expenses attributable to use (e.g., tire replacement for trucks). They also include the living expenses (shelter, provisions) for the hands. And they probably include at least part of the crew wages.
The fixed costs include the costs of acquiring the transport vehicle (e.g., mule, railroad train, sailing ship), the terminal facilities (e.g, a dock, railroad station, airport, and also perhaps a warehouse), and the right-of-way (e.g., railroad track). Conveniently, there are no right of way costs for the open sea or for the air (unless you count air traffic control).
A carrier may not need to pay its full share of the fixed costs of the transport system. Some transportation infrastructure costs are financed by governments, through taxes or bond issues, and not passed on to carriers through usage fees.
Fixed costs also include licenses, taxes and insurance, to the extent they are independent of the mileage. And they include the overhead (the carrier's office and office employees).
In terms of variable costs, in the twentieth century, transport by water was cheaper than rail, and rail cheaper than road. But if you look at fixed costs, the reverse is true. That means that there will be a critical distance at which the cost of truck and rail transport is equal (~500–750 km in 2000, Slack). Trucking will be cheaper for shorter routes, and rail for longer ones. Likewise, there will be a critical distance at which the cost of rail and barge transport is equal (~1500 km in 2000).
For air travel, there is no critical distance at which it is cheaper than alternative transport modes (Rawdon).
In the real world, one also finds "mixed" costs, which have a basal level (fixed), but which also increase to some degree as a result of economic activity. For example, railroad tracks, locomotives and rolling stock always require maintenance, but the amount of wear and tear increases with use. The same is true of sailing ships.
Classification of costs isn't always easy. For example, if the crew level and pay is constant, whether the ship is in port or at sea, then crew salaries are a fixed cost. If the entire crew is hired for a specific voyage, and discharged at journey's end, and the wages paid are proportional to the length of the voyage, then the salaries are a variable cost. If the truth lies somewhere in-between, they are a mixed cost.
There are also costs which depend on the number of trips, or the number of stops, but not on the length of the journey. Those don't neatly fit the definition of either fixed costs or variable costs. Examples: port fees, turnpike entry tolls. They, too, can be considered mixed costs. However, if a turnpike or canal has multiple toll stations, then you are paying a right of way fee which is effectively proportional to distance traveled, and that makes it a variable cost.
Some costs depend on the amount of cargo transported, rather than on travel duration or distance, and hence are classified as fixed costs even though they are incurred only if there is some transport activity. Cargo handling costs are the most obvious example. Kohn says that for a given size ship, fully loaded, the cost of loading and unloading should be constant. (Actually, it's the time that should be constant, ignoring handling technology differences, but the costs will also depend on local wage levels.) If that cost is spread over a longer journey, then the effective cost per mile is less. Handling fees can be significant; for an 1878 voyage between Liverpool and Bombay, the stevedores' and port charges were about 14% of the total cost. (Armstrong 106).
Tolls can also fall into that category, as the use fee can be based on the cargo (as opposed to being a flat fee, or one based on cargo capacity).
From the carrier's point of view, fixed costs are bad, because you endure them even when you don't have a customer. It is sometimes possible to transform a fixed cost into a variable cost. For example, you could defer buying mules until you had a delivery contract, and resell the mules when the mission was completed. Or you could rent animals by the day or by the miles traveled (this was done for post horses). And you can discharge crew at voyage's end. Of course, whether this is a good idea or not depends on how much more you have to pay for the increased flexibility, and whether you might lose profitable business because the animals or crew weren't available for purchase when you needed them.
Carrier Rate Setting
If you are the carrier, then to stay in business, your transport charges have to cover both types of costs. If you are the customer (the shipper), then you will find that the fares you are charged are designed to cover, not only the direct journey costs, but also your journey's share of the carrier's fixed costs.
The greater your "wait time" (whether it be for maintenance, or just waiting for a cargo), the more important your fixed costs are. One of the disadvantages of aircraft is that they require a lot of maintenance. In WW II, the average shuttle plane was on the ground at least 15 hours a day (Snell).
It is possible that a vehicle might need more maintenance (e.g., careening a ship to clean off barnacles) after a long journey than after a short one. However, the "wait time" for obtaining new cargos is a function of the vehicle's cargo capacity, and the infrastructure for bringing new cargos to it, rather than the length of its last trip.
The greater the total "wait time," the smaller the revenue base which has to pay for all the costs, fixed and variable. If short hauls are assigned their fair share of the down time, their rate per ton mile will be higher than for the long hauls.
The fixed costs paid during wait time aren't necessarily just the rental or finance charges on your vehicle. In the seventeenth century, it was the practice that, when in an intermediate port (i.e., not your home port), you continued to pay your sailors wages, even though you didn't have to feed them. On the Bristol-Bordeaux run, port-time wages increased total labor costs as much as four-fold. (Kohn I).
When the journeys are long, wait time is relatively small, variable costs dominate, and charges are proportional to distance traveled.
For short hauls, the fixed costs are more important, and the effective ton mile price is likely to be greater.
Up-Time Improvements in Transport
My concern here is not to determine which up-time improvements can be duplicated post-Ring of Fire, and how, but rather to ascertain what their effect would be on transportation costs, carrying capacity, etc.
Roads. Clearly, roadways can be improved, and the USE has already made a start on this. The great pioneers in road design were Thomas Telford (1757–1834) and John McAdam (1756–1836). Their roads initially had a broken stone surface; the wagon traffic compacted the stones, and generated dust, which then acted, together with rainwater, as a binding medium. Both also gave careful attention to drainage, but Telford favored a foundation of large, uniformly sized stones, which increased the expense and construction time, while McAdam was content with soil if it was well-drained. It was McAdam's views which prevailed, and the English came to speak of hard-surfaced roads as being "macadamed."
These roads allowed for an increase in overland transport speed. For example, Telford's London-to-Holyhead road, 261 miles long, constructed 1815–1830, could be traversed by coaches in slightly over 23 hours, not counting the stops for horse changes and meals. (Hindley, 69). In contrast, in mid-nineteenth century Germany, the roads were only good enough to allow a pace of twenty miles a day (comparable to the non-turnpike roads in England). (Hindley, 79).
When rubber tires appeared on the scene, and road speeds increased, the raising of dust became a problem. The solution was the use of tar as a binding agent (hence the name "tar macadam," or "tarmac").
Nineteenth-century America was blessed with immense forests, and this fostered the development of "plank" or "corduroy" roads. When in good condition, they allowed rapid travel (coaches at 9 mph), but they wore out within a few years. Wood is relatively expensive in seventeenth-century Germany.
Even without road improvement, it is possible to achieve an advance in transport efficiency merely by standardizing the "rut gauge" of vehicles in the USE. (Hindley, 78).
Motor Vehicles. There are thousands of motor vehicles in Grantville, but they can't be put to effective use until roads are improved and fuel problems solved.
Rail. Railways–even without locomotives–offer great improvements in the volume of freight that a route can handle. In our time line, the first use of rails was in mines, with ponies drawing the mine train. Mules can draw twelve times their own weight if the load is on a rail car. That is a thirty-six fold improvement in the mules' cargo carrying efficiency. Draft horses would enjoy a similar benefit. (HNC).
Horse-drawn trains were used for a time on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The "crew" was 42 horses and 12 men, and the total operating cost was $33/day. The horses towed the train at a speed of 10 mph (Dilts, 196).
The introduction of steam locomotives will ultimately improve both drawing capacity and speed. The Stephenson Planet began operation between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. It drew eighteen carriages, with a total load of eighty seven tons (eight tons for the engine, one ton for the fifteen man crew, four tons for tender, water and fuel, fifty one tons of cargo, and twenty three tons of wagons and oil-cloths). The journey took just shy of three hours, and the average speed was over twelve miles an hour (Ringwalt).
They are also more economical. The 1832 locomotive Atlantic, which replaced the B&O horses, could go 20 mph, and its operating cost was just $16/day ($8/ton anthracite, $2 engineer, $1.50 assistant).
The building of rail lines won't make roads obsolete. There are practical limits to the density of the rail network, and stagecoaches (or motor vehicles) will transport goods (and people) to and from the rail stations.
Sailing Ships. The speed of sailing ships can be improved by a variety of up-time improvements, which include the combination of square-rigged sails with fore-and-aft sails (1725), the round-headed rudder (1779), the steering wheel (1706), copper sheathing (1778), high length-to-beam ratios (1812), iron hulls (1838), and so forth. These advances led, directly or indirectly, to faster long-distance speeds. "In 1853 McKay's Sovereign of the Sea [an extreme clipper, with a long streamlined hull and plenty of canvas] sailed 421 miles in 24 hours." (Marshall, 99, 112, 114, 140 et seq., 152).
Steamers. Steamships entered the river trade in 1807 and the ocean trade in 1819, but the paddles of the early models were less effective, and vulnerable to damage, in rough waters. Screw-propelled steamers first went to sea in 1839. Iron hulls, although first used on sailing ships, were even more important for the success of steamships, because they could better withstand the vibrations imparted by the propeller, and allowed construction of longer hulls, which in turn ensured ample space for the bunker, boiler and engine. (Marshall, 163-64) The combination of the iron hull and the screw propeller was first realized in Brunel's 1840 Great Britain. Later advances included steel hulls, high-pressure boilers, compound steam engines, and, after 1900, diesel engines.
Air Travel. While there were pre-war experiments, use of aircraft to carry passengers, mail and freight escalated after World War I. Aircraft include airships (blimps and zeppelins), helicopters and planes. Before 1939, all planes had propellers driven by an internal combustion piston engine.
It is likely that the first post-RoF civilian aircraft will be using scavenged automobile engines. It will be some years before the USE can build new engines, with alternative designs, from scratch.
Aircraft designers must strike a balance between lightness and strength. The first aircraft were wood-and-canvas constructions, but steel was used in the Fokker DVII, and aluminum alloys came into common use between the two world wars.
Because there are no airports yet, there is going to be a lot of interest in bush planes with floats, skis or outsize "tundra tires."
Larger aircraft may be seaplanes or amphibious aircraft, and their water landing capability may be attributable to floats or to buoyant hulls ("flying boats"). The first transoceanic passenger flights used such notable examples as the Sikorsky S-38 (1928), the Martin M-130 (1934), the Sikorski S-42 (1936), and the Boeing 314 (1938). These planes had formidable engines.
Uptime Improvements in Intermodal Transfer
In the seventeenth century, goods might be floated downriver on rafts or barges, loaded onto a sailing ship, and transferred at the destination port to a wagon to be hauled to the final destination. Each time there was a change of transportation mode, the various sacks and crates would have to be taken off one vehicle, and then stowed on another. This cost time and money.
Consequently, there have been several methods over the years to improve the efficiency of intermodal transfers.
Road/Rail. Both up-time cars and down-time wagons can be transported by train, on some kind of flat car, to a trailhead, where they are offloaded and proceed further on their own. This is called "piggyback service."
In the early days of railroading, inventors tried to develop vehicles which could travel on both roads and rails. One pre-1850 rail-road vehicle offered what you might call an early example of the container concept. The stagecoach cabin was hoisted off a underframe bearing wagon wheels, and lowered onto another one with flanged rail wheels. (NOCK/D, plates 64–5, and page 128).
The modern equivalent is called a "swap body." It has a strong bottom section which can be placed on either a truck chassis or a rail bogie. It differs from a true contained in that the upper section is weak, so it can't be stacked.
One obvious problem with this design is the time lost in changing transportation modes. For track maintenance, various road/rail utility vehicles (e.g., pickup trucks) have been equipped with fore-and-aft sets of flanged guide wheels so they can literally stay on track. These were first commercialized in the 1940's, under the trademark HY-RAIL®, and largely replaced the old dedicated railcars. (Winkworth). However, the vehicles still ride on their tires.
Land/Water. Vehicle ferries offer another form of "piggyback service." An adaptation of this was proposed; the "trailer ship," in which a truck trailer is detached from the "tractor" and rolled into the ship's hold.
Containerization. The most important concept in intermodal transport is containerization. The cargo is shipped in large standardized, stackable containers (e.g., 20 x 8 x 6 feet) which are not opened in transit. A container may first move overland on a truck chassis, then be lifted onto a flat bed rail car, and travel by rail to a port where it's hoisted onto a "container ship."
Containerization reduces handling costs and time by a tremendous margin. Of course, the cranes and other handling equipment have to be of a scale and power suitable to the large, heavy loads presented by the containers.
The Effect of Uptime Improvements on Transport Costs
Improved Roads. Improved roads will affect transport costs in a variety of ways, direct and indirect. First of all, if a toll is charged for using a road, that naturally will increase costs. On the other hand, the improved road can be traversed more rapidly, which will reduce what must be spent for food and lodging for man and beast. Vehicle maintenance costs are also likely to be lower. In 1839, an engineer estimated that it cost 15-20 cents per ton-mile to transport goods on an ordinary turnpike, and only 10–15 cents on a macadam road. (Meyer 574). The turnpike, of course, was itself an improvement on the typical country road.
New Vehicles. In theory, the same methods used to forecast costs for transport by packhorse, wagon, animal-drawn barge or sailing ship can be used to calculate the costs of using steamships, railroads, or even aircraft. That is, determine a characteristic ton mile cost for each mode, and then for any proposed shipment, multiply the ton mile unit cost by the cargo weight in tons and the route length in miles.
Such a calculation is straightforward, and, indeed the cost database, from which the ton mile rates are derived, is much more comprehensive for these nineteenth- and twentieth-century conveyances than for the down-time vehicles. The catch is that the rates are initially expressed in nineteenth- or twentieth-century dollars, or pounds sterling. My conversion methods are summarized in Table 2.
There are many objections which can be raised against relying on price indexes for rescaling transport costs from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries to the 1632 Universe. I discuss some of them in the Transportation System Addendum. But until someone comes up with a better alternative. rely on them I shall.
Returning to my earlier example, if a steam power-based railroad were operating between Eisenach and Hanover, I would predict (subject to the caveats about purchasing power) that the costs would drop to New US$6.90 per sewing machine case. And the transit time would be perhaps six hours.
Conclusion
The ideal goods for long-distance foreign trade are those which can be purchased cheaply, and yet have, at the intended destination, a high value relative to their weight and bulk. In the Age of Exploration, many voyages were made to search for new goods which could be the object of profitable trades (e.g., silver from the New World for silk from China).
One advantage that the up-timers have is that they know which goods were ultimately successful in the original time-line, and roughly where to find (or how to make) them. However, they cannot afford to ignore the economic realities of trading in the early seventeenth century. Those realities include an understanding of the costs of transportation.
References
References appear in the Transportation System Addendum on www.1632.org .
