Help with canals

[Fraoch]

Hello:

I've been looking at online and in-game documentation and tutorials and I have yet to find anything that addresses canals.

I'm trying to get a tanker ship from an oil rig up a canal.  I'm not sure if this is possible but I think it should be.  However every time I try it, the ship docks with the oil rig, loads, and then stops with a "no route" error.

I think what's going on is that the canal has "rapids" (an elevation change) that the ship obviously can't cross.  There seems to be something to solve this, the ship hoist.  I can't seem to use it though, it wants to bridge the rapids the wrong way - horizontally across the land rather than over the water.  It seems to need a point on land on either side of the hoist but if that's the case I'll have to build a new canal altogether...even when I did, it didn't solve the "no route" error.

If I make a canal over the rapids, it makes what looks like locks - sort of a retaining wall.  They don't seem to do anything though, the ship still can't find a route.

Is there any help with the ship hoist?  How should I do this?  I'm pretty sure I can make a port on the sea coast and build a railway to it but that defeats the purpose of a canal.

I'm playing 110.0, pak64, on 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 11.04.

Thank you.

[VS]

Currently no special construction is required to move ships between elevation levels. Simply build a canal up the slope and what you call "locks" should appear.

So, there must be some other error, perhaps no connected tiles of canal or such...?

There might be some translation problems, too... other than a canal (way), you can build an aqueduct (bridge), depot and canal stops.

[Fraoch]

Thanks!

I've made some progress.  I realized that what LOOKED like a canal was in fact a stream, and needed to be turned into a canal.

So I did that.  The ship can now make it almost to the quay, but placing it seems to be a problem - see screenshot.

I can't place a larger "dock with large crane" or "dock with heavy-duty crane" here.  I also can't place a quay with pier (which is what I think I need), all I can place is the quay which is shown in the screenshot.  The ship can't access it, scheduling it to halt at the quay gives a "ship must dock in a water square" message and getting it to halt in the water square next to the quay marks the destination as "waypoint" and the ship doesn't carry anything.

I've tried lowering the land here but can't - a "slope must be cleared first" error message and I think the oil refinery is what's blocking the slope.

[VS]

Oh! Well... You can build 1-tile piers on land, if they are next to rivers, but they do nothing. You want a "canal stop" - the canal is just like a road, so instead of a bus stop, you'll build a ship stop... The whole "building quays on land" thing is just for eye candy (and some confusion, admittedly).

[Fraoch]

Just before you posted it I figured it out - exactly what you say, I need a wharf, not a quay.

I experimented trying the quay/pier on the ocean shoreline - it made a nice quay 4 tiles long.  Of course this wouldn't work in a canal, so I tried a wharf - bingo!

Yes the ship now picks up oil and goes down the canal to deliver it to the oil refinery.  Now, of course, the canal is restricted to 30 km/h but the ship has a much greater capacity than a train...hmm.  This I can figure out, part of the fun.