What Franglais describes also applies to Germany.Barges travel from Rotterdam to Switzerland via the Rhine plus various offshoots(Main and Mosel).The rivers are much wider and the difference in scale between us and them is enormous.
A lot of aggregate travelled on barges from Mountsorrell quarry to the London area in fairly recent years, maybe it still does?
Pete.
Could do with getting some of these muppets off the roads reduce the daily carnage
With the Rhine linked to the Danube, barges can & do now travel from Holland as far as Romania & the Black sea.
A Quick zoom in at this shows Dutch, French and Austrian vessels in the Romanian section
A new inland port in Leeds could remove up to half a million tonnes of freight traffic from the city’s roads and reduce congestion. 
leeds-live.co.uk/news/leeds … t-17211070
lancpudn:
A new inland port in Leeds could remove up to half a million tonnes of freight traffic from the city’s roads and reduce congestion.
So, an extra half million tons of freight will now enter the road system in Leeds?
Any aggregates won’t all be for Leeds centre building sites will it? Shop deliveries won’t be coming in this way.
I don’t doubt benefits are possible by using waterways more, but it needs fully integrated planning to work well.
Up to about 10/12 years ago the Aire & Calder was carrying mainly fuel and aggregates. Coal used to go that way to Ferrybridge, but that’s closed and partly demolished. The dockers put paid to a lot of canal and river traffic when they refused to handle Tom Pudding, Bacat and Lash systems.
I would love to see it all opened up again, why stop at Stourton? My old mate lives on the river Soar and sails up to Whitby via the Trent if he can find someone to help with the locks.