Ostend to Brugge

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SeanCurrie
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Ostend to Brugge

Post by SeanCurrie »

Hello everyone. Apologies for the interruption, but I know you guys know roads. I am an American novelist writing a story set in 1963.
I have looked at your excellent US Army 1959 map, but it's not quite detailed enough. Does anyone know the road from Ostend to Bruges (now called the N9, I believe)?
If you could point me at a map, or just tell me, I would be very grateful.
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exiled
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by exiled »

Welcome aboard.

It really depends on what you want. Belgium has been a first adopter for infrastructure since the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium in 1830. The route of the N9 is probably the best one to imagine although it will have been improved. One thing I would check is the language. The sixties are when Flemish really started to be used by the Belgian state.
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Vierwielen
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by Vierwielen »

Although this does not answer your question, Ostend was an important port for links to the UK. One got off the ship, went through passport control and onto the station platform. I did this trip many times in the late 1970's.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by WHBM »

We went on holidays to Ostend in 1962-3, and standard then was an afternoon coach excursion to Brugge, a quick run down this motorway. It was also used on another day for an all-day excursion to Brussels. Quite new then, of concrete construction with expansion joints between the blocks, it was quickly notorious, even in Britain, for slight sinking at the joints giving a bam-bam-bam progress. Having observed the Autobahn developments in Germany, I think the land was bought in the late 1930s for Ostend to Cologne, a major Belgian axis, but construction was not completed until the 1950s. Eventually it was resurfaced.

In the bilingual-ness of Belgium, even in the 1960s Flemish was the universal language in Ostend and Brugge, and French was not known, apart from those senior and more educated staff who dealt with tourists and spoke Flemish, French, English and German with equal facility.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by ravenbluemoon »

Related but on a slight tangent - have the UK-Ostend ferries completely disappeared now? I was looking at going via Belgium to get to Sweden in a couple of months as it seems like a more reliable option that going via France/Netherlands. Looks like the only route open now is Hull-Zeebrugge.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

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ravenbluemoon wrote: Sun Aug 01, 2021 18:08 Related but on a slight tangent - have the UK-Ostend ferries completely disappeared now? I was looking at going via Belgium to get to Sweden in a couple of months as it seems like a more reliable option that going via France/Netherlands. Looks like the only route open now is Hull-Zeebrugge.
The infamous Seabourne freight were going to reopen Ramsgate to Ostend, but there's currently no operator on that route, nor on Dover to Ostend.

You can do Harwich to the Hook still on Stena, and Dover to Dunkirk on DFDS. P&O do Hull to Rotterdam. Hull to Zeebrugge was cancelled at the start of this year.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by ravenbluemoon »

c2R wrote: Sun Aug 01, 2021 20:21 The infamous Seabourne freight were going to reopen Ramsgate to Ostend, but there's currently no operator on that route, nor on Dover to Ostend.

You can do Harwich to the Hook still on Stena, and Dover to Dunkirk on DFDS. P&O do Hull to Rotterdam. Hull to Zeebrugge was cancelled at the start of this year.
Oh, so nothing at all serving Ostend, or indeed Belgium!

I did Harwich-Hoek last year. Going on current restrictions I wanted to avoid Netherlands and France, but things may change in the next month :)
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by KeithW »

In the 1980's there was still a ferry service between Folkestone Harbour and Ostend. In 1959 the train from London ran down from the town along the Tram Road to the Pier where you walked off the train and onto the passenger ferry. The RORO car ferry came many years later. This GSV shows the pier.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.07713 ... 6656?hl=en

The ferries run British Rail at the time were passenger only, the Maid Of Orleans operated from Folkestone to Boulogne between from 1950 until 1972. As RORO ferries came into service they were all retired. These were relatively small vessels and were quite lively in rough seas. I travelled on that route in the 1970's with my dad, who was a veteran of the Dunkirk evacuation, and on the return trip the sea was so rough the ship spent and hour circling outside the port until the weather moderated enough for us to dock. Luckily both he and I were good sailors but a large proportion of the passengers were very seasick indeed. As I understand it they were built on the basic hull of a C Class WW2 Destroyer
https://www.doverferryphotosforums.co.u ... d-present/

The N9 still basically follows the same route as shown here on Google maps although the main route now is the A10.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/51.23 ... !3e0?hl=en
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by roadtester »

KeithW wrote: Mon Aug 02, 2021 13:21 In the 1980's there was still a ferry service between Folkestone Harbour and Ostend. In 1959 the train from London ran down from the town along the Tram Road to the Pier where you walked off the train and onto the passenger ferry. The RORO car ferry came many years later. This GSV shows the pier.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.07713 ... 6656?hl=en

The ferries run British Rail at the time were passenger only, the Maid Of Orleans operated from Folkestone to Boulogne between from 1950 until 1972. As RORO ferries came into service they were all retired. These were relatively small vessels and were quite lively in rough seas. I travelled on that route in the 1970's with my dad, who was a veteran of the Dunkirk evacuation, and on the return trip the sea was so rough the ship spent and hour circling outside the port until the weather moderated enough for us to dock. Luckily both he and I were good sailors but a large proportion of the passengers were very seasick indeed. As I understand it they were built on the basic hull of a C Class WW2 Destroyer
https://www.doverferryphotosforums.co.u ... d-present/
You'd like to think that something based on the hull-form of an RN destroyer would have better sea-keeping abilities than that!

I made the crossing several times with my parents when they worked for the forces in Germany in the sixties and seventies. The Sealink ferries had quite a low reputation. I think my dad told me that one of them was actually a converted cattle ship - he became a firm convert to the Townsend Thoresen service via Zeebrugge, which had much more modern kit and offered an all-round nicer experience. They were, I have to admit, a shining example of the benefits of free enterprise (proudly proclaimed in many of the TT ferries' names) compared with the state-run Sealink.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by WHBM »

The N9 Ostend to Bruges etc is the "old road" through villages etc, the A10 is the replacing motorway. The old N9 between villages was a typical Belgian straight, 3-lane road with a poor accident record. Nowadays it has been restriped down to an S2 2-lane road with bicycle tracks on the outside.

The railway ships were commonly built by William Denny of Dumbarton, long regarded as the experts at short sea passenger vessels and hull design. Notably, they had their own water tank simulator to test hull designs, which they were known for. Their ships of this type were exported as far away as Canada. I've generally believed that the principal cause of poor seaworthiness across the Channel is that you are operating at right angles to the prevailing wind and swell, the latter gets exacerbated by the surprisingly shallow depth, to the extent that any ship sunk even in mid-channel has to be guarded against others striking them before they are raised from the bottom - something which cannot be readily overcome.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by KeithW »

roadtester wrote: Mon Aug 02, 2021 13:31
You'd like to think that something based on the hull-form of an RN destroyer would have better sea-keeping abilities than that!

I made the crossing several times with my parents when they worked for the forces in Germany in the sixties and seventies. The Sealink ferries had quite a low reputation. I think my dad told me that one of them was actually a converted cattle ship - he became a firm convert to the Townsend Thoresen service via Zeebrugge, which had much more modern kit and offered an all-round nicer experience. They were, I have to admit, a shining example of the benefits of free enterprise (proudly proclaimed in many of the TT ferries' names) compared with the state-run Sealink.
As I understand it the problem was that putting a large but lightweight superstructure on an existing hull made them very stiff. A stiff design means they roll much less in heavy seas which is good from the point of sea keeping but they also roll much faster which is less so for passenger comfort. The result is rather akin to riding in a motor vehicle with ineffective shock absorbers. Its opposite is a 'tender' hull which will roll through a greater angle but do so more slowly. At the end of the day the most important aspect of a destroyer hull was to be stable gun platform rather than crew comfort. However when these ships were built in 1949 the yards were still tooled up to build escort vessels and very likely a number of incomplete hulls were left on the slips.

I can well believe the use of an old cattle ship, some of the early RoRo ferries were decommissioned tank landing ships.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by SeanCurrie »

Thank you all so much. These might not have hit my question head on, but they give good indications. For your information, I have used Southend to Ostend by Freddie Laker's British United Air Ferries, then returned (because the hero cannot stay in Belgium) on the Calais-Dover Townsend ferry "Free Enterprise". I used the N9 in Belgium and the coast road, which I believe was name 72 (according to my research). Again, thank you all.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by Vierwielen »

I remember ferries such as the "Free Enterprise". One drove into the back of the ferry on a ramp and had to do a "U turn" inside the ferry to leave the vessel - unlike the current generation of ferries that have a lifting bow that enable a "drive-through" operation. (See photos here).
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

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Vierwielen wrote: Mon Sep 20, 2021 21:44 I remember ferries such as the "Free Enterprise". One drove into the back of the ferry on a ramp and had to do a "U turn" inside the ferry to leave the vessel - unlike the current generation of ferries that have a lifting bow that enable a "drive-through" operation. (See photos here).
There are still a number of ferries that do this on upper decks, even though they operate in drive through operation - the Stena e-Flexers, for example, have a ramp up to Deck 7 (and the ships that they replaced on the Birkenhead to Belfast crossing did also). Other vessels that operate similarly are some of the Fast Cats.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

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Vierwielen wrote: Mon Sep 20, 2021 21:44 I remember ferries such as the "Free Enterprise". One drove into the back of the ferry on a ramp and had to do a "U turn" inside the ferry to leave the vessel - unlike the current generation of ferries that have a lifting bow that enable a "drive-through" operation. (See photos here).
wildly off-topic, but stern-only operation is the norm for large ferries operating in the Mediterranean- even though many are equipped with bow doors (there's some interchange of vessels between Med and northern European routes). Unless you have a complex long folding ramp that can emerge from behind the bow door you need a linkspan for bow docking operations- whilst rear-only when you have a miniscule tidal range means you can just use a quay, which is much cheaper to build and operate. They can even moor stern-to quays.
Slightly on-topic, the Hull-Rotterdam ferries board cars to the upper decks using a side-on linkspan midway along the vessels. And because there's many ways to this, some Japanese routes moor alongside a quay and use diagonal ramps fore and aft.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

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Al__S wrote: Wed Oct 06, 2021 20:41 wildly off-topic, but stern-only operation is the norm for large ferries operating in the Mediterranean- even though many are equipped with bow doors (there's some interchange of vessels between Med and northern European routes). Unless you have a complex long folding ramp that can emerge from behind the bow door you need a linkspan for bow docking operations- whilst rear-only when you have a miniscule tidal range means you can just use a quay, which is much cheaper to build and operate. They can even moor stern-to quays.
I returned from Corsica on the ferry last week. The ferry was stern-only loading and unloading, and I was sent to the lowest deck, which was a square room accessed by a single ramp from a higher deck, into which they crammed as many cars as they could in a variety of directions.

I had to face the anger of the employee who was guiding parking, when I was very cautious in parking in a space between cars which was not much wider than my car (even ignoring wing mirrors). Unloading was worse - we couldn't access the car deck for maybe 25 minutes after landing, and then it was one car at a time. Again they were angry at me for caution in reversing, with other cars nearby. The first cars released had to reverse up quite a steep ramp - fortunately by the time I was released there was room to turn round beforehand. It was around an hour after landing before we left the ship.

It was a bit of a culture shock after being used to the drive-through cross-channel ferries, but I now look back on it as an interesting experience.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

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Al__S wrote: Wed Oct 06, 2021 20:41
Vierwielen wrote: Mon Sep 20, 2021 21:44 I remember ferries such as the "Free Enterprise". One drove into the back of the ferry on a ramp and had to do a "U turn" inside the ferry to leave the vessel - unlike the current generation of ferries that have a lifting bow that enable a "drive-through" operation. (See photos here).
wildly off-topic, but stern-only operation is the norm for large ferries operating in the Mediterranean- even though many are equipped with bow doors (there's some interchange of vessels between Med and northern European routes). Unless you have a complex long folding ramp that can emerge from behind the bow door you need a linkspan for bow docking operations- whilst rear-only when you have a miniscule tidal range means you can just use a quay, which is much cheaper to build and operate. They can even moor stern-to quays.
Slightly on-topic, the Hull-Rotterdam ferries board cars to the upper decks using a side-on linkspan midway along the vessels. And because there's many ways to this, some Japanese routes moor alongside a quay and use diagonal ramps fore and aft.
In the early 1980's I had a one-week assignment in Tripoli. I don't know if all the hotels were full, but my accomodation was in a ferry that was moored up for the entire week. Access was via the car ramp.
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Re: Ostend to Brugge

Post by Al__S »

yeah what with just using a bit of quay the access for foot passengers on Mediterranean ferries is apparently "exciting". Parents got an Igoumentisa-Ancona ferry about five years ago and said they bascially had to dodge trucks disembarking/embarking whilst trying to work out which ferry they were booked on, at about midnight
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