Hello, salut, and adieu!
It is January 2021
and I am the only passenger on a bus
between the town of Montauban and the smaller town of Montech
in the southwest of France.
And why am I going to a place called Montech?
Well if you watched my last video then you already know
but for anyone who didn’t, we are looking for one of these.
And what on earth is that?
Well we’re about to find out.
I hope.
It’s been abandoned for several years
and I don’t even know for sure if it’s still there.
So, welcome to the hunt...
for the Monster of Montech!
This is Montauban,
about 50km north of Toulouse in the region of Occitanie.
And it is, like apparently every random French town I turn up in,
ridiculously beautiful.
Or at least it would be if you could see it.
It’s famous as the birthplace of the neoclassical painter Ingres,
and the writer Olympe de Gouges,
who rose to fame after the French revolution
when she pointed out that if they were serious about Liberté and Egalité,
they should apply it to slaves and women as well,
it didn’t seem fair that she had the right to be guillotined
when she barely had the right to speak.
The authorities agreed
but unfortunately only with the bit about her having the right to be guillotined.
Anyway, speaking of sudden cuts,
we were on a bus to Montech.
Montech lies on the Canal de Garonne,
the canal that was built parallel to the River Garonne
and which joins with the Canal du Midi in Toulouse
to create a route all the way across France
from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.
The town itself stands at the top of a gentle incline
and from here there is a stretch of 5 descending locks over the next 2km,
during which your boat drops about 13m in total.
So it’s not quite the canal staircase that we saw before,
but it would still take over an hour to get through it all.
And so in the early 1970s
an engineer called Jean Aubert came up with a better idea.
And all he was going to need…
wait for it…
was a giant 700m water slide,
and the insane monster vehicle from the last video.
Unfortunately though that vehicle doesn’t exist yet,
so here’s one he made earlier...
This was his first boat-lifting vehicle
and it worked on the same principle:
in other words, whack enough power behind it,
and you can push water up a hill with a boat in it.
And if you’d like to make one of these at home you’ll need
two second-hand diesel railway locomotives, 16 tractor wheels, and a couple of girders.
Stick a water barrier on the front of it attached to a hydraulic arm
and you’ve got the Monster of Montech;
one of the weirdest looking vehicles you’re ever going to see.
But unlike the later high-tech custom-made vehicle at Fonseranes,
this one actually worked!
It ran from 1974 to 2009,
and to tell you more about that,
here is Marcel,
a random friendly passer-by who stopped to ask if I was filming the water slope
and then told me all about it.
Now on the last video a few of you asked in the comments
"how did they make the barrier watertight when it was moving up and down the slope?"
Well the answer is...
they didn’t.
It could never really be fully watertight and also able to move,
so the barrier did leak a bit.
But what they did was they would leave a trickle of water
coming down through the locks at the top of the slope
and that would make up for the water that was being lost.
Ok, let’s go back to Marcel, who is now going to tell us what went wrong.
And so with no more work available for it,
the Monster of Montech was left abandoned at the bottom of the slope,
with its blue and white paint gradually peeling away.
And to be honest that’s what I was expecting to find when I got here.
But as you may have spotted, something’s happening.
It’s moved.
And now it looks like this...
Yep, the regional government has recently restored it and repainted it
and they’ve kind of ruined it,
but this is France,
where the only way you get funding for a project
is if you make it into some kind of artistic statement.
(And then you can get funding for anything!)
So what is happening here?
Well there’s good news and bad news:
unfortunately the monster isn’t going to be working again any time soon,
but it is going to be the centrepiece of a new local heritage centre
and when it opens
you’ll be able to get up close and see inside
Monsieur Aubert’s magnificently mad machine.
Of course,
none of this explains why anyone thought that THIS was the way to get a boat up a slope.
I’ve really enjoyed seeing all your comments coming in on the last video
saying "why didn’t he just use ropes?!"
or a chain,
or cogwheels,
or a counterweight?
And the thing is, all of that applies here too.
There’s a hundred different ways to do it
that would make more sense than what he actually did.
And what blows my mind is that when he built the second one,
he looked back at this one and thought,
you know what the problem was,
it wasn’t complicated enough.
But that’s why I like this story.
In all the history of overengineering and overcomplicating things
no one has ever pushed the boat out quite like Jean Aubert.
If you’d like to visit the Monster of Montech,
it is a short 15 minute bus ride from Montauban
leaving 5 times a day from right outside the railway station.
And I say bus it’s actually a very comfortable long-distance coach.
The new museum is opening this summer
and includes not just the canal locks and the water slope
but also the historic local paper mill.
At the time of publishing this video
I don’t have an exact date or any prices
but on the plus side it does look like it’s going to be fully wheelchair accessible.
And that’s about it from Montech,
thank you very much for watching
and I will see you soon.