Schneider et Cie

The ”Chantiers de Chalon sur Saône: constructions navales. – Schneider et Cie”

The second half of the 19th century was the golden age of the development of rail transport and steamships. The metallurgical industry is booming. The Schneider establishments, located in Le Creusot, in Saône-et-Loire, created shipyards in Chalon-sur-Saône, at the place where the Charollais canal ends which makes the junction between the Loire and the Saône (known today as today under the name of Canal du Centre) and which brings the raw material.

Originally, in 1839, the shipyards of Petit-Creusot were mainly dedicated to the construction of steamboats intended for river navigation. Soon, their production will diversify and grow.

In the following decades, the Schneider shipyards received orders for small units for the French Navy. They also produce metal structures used in particular in the construction of stations and some of the most impressive bridges such as the first swing bridge in France, that of Brest, inaugurated in 1861, or the Grandfey railway viaduct (1862) in Switzerland, and the Malleco viaduct (1886) in Chile, among other achievements.

In 1897 a dredger built fort he port of Rochefort, caused some problems.  M. Michael-Schmidt, director of the Chantiers de Chalon, decided to develop further the activities in the Chalon regio. After a unsuccessful attempt for cooperation  with the local yard of Henri Satre, he approached the Dutch and in 1904 he reached an agreement with Werf Conrad for he construction of all kinds of dredging equipment.

One of the big difficulty hereby was the strongly fluctuating waterdepth in the Sâone and Rhone rivers, which affected among others the  costs for the transports of various floating elements from the Mediterranean to Chalon, and the assembled dredgers the other way.

This great project did not get any follow up

In the list of constructed vessels there are some dredgers, such as a bucketladder dregfr for Japan (1866) a dipper dredger for a French company called MM Vigner (1903) and 2 dredgers for Egypt (1891 and 1892)