Commercial river traffic & Colonial French

The Khone Falls have still never been conquered for commercial river traffic. However, the colonial French did eventually come up with a bizarre and expensive navigable solution – laying a railway line, complete with locomotive, docks and cranes, on an island in the middle of the falls. Passenger or goods were disembarked above or below the falls and transported by rail to the craft awaiting them on the other side.
While it never succeeded in opening up the river in the way they hoped – It took 37 days and required at least seven changes of vessel to travel from Saigon to Luang Prababg, Laos – the rail link operated for forty years, only coming to an end in 1940 when the Second World War reached Indochina. Although a barrier to the mass movement of people, the Mekong rapids of northern Cambodian are a critical part of migratory journey for large numbers of fish. A mosaic of sand and gravel islands, rocks and boulders, the river in these stretches alternated between shallow rapids and deep pools.