Website of writer Sutton on marine topics

[Kapitan]

H I Sutton at covert shores has been doing research for some time, not always correct but he is pretty accurate on most things and also some other items are speculation in part.

He does do some good cutaways he is on twitter too @CovertShores

The waterways that are inland have depth restrictions I would down the 6.2m draft of a kilo would get through even with a tug assist.
They used to bring subs down on floating dry dock type ships from Nizhniy Novgorod

The Moscow Canal for example is only about 5.5m deep on average, the Volga-Baltic waterway is much larger yet has a maximum average depth of around 6m and an imposed draught limit of 4m

To navigate a ship your going to need at least 1.5 / 2m under the keel

The add the issue in of bridges spanning some of the canals from waterline to shortest bridge span is around 11.7 meters, take a kilo out of the water and put that on a dry dock assembly I can almost guarantee two things.

1. you wont have much of a bridge left once the sub passes
2. the submarine will be seriously damaged from the experience

It has however been done in the past but since then a lot of the towns have been built up even more, so the state of the waterways is a questionable one in some parts.

So in his inland waterways article this references here are not fully correct if they are travelling without the use of special barges like the Sierra and Victors they built in Nizhniy Novgorod.

But it seems likely that non-nuclear submarines could be transported this way.

The internal waterways should make it possible to move the submarines from the Black Sea to the Baltic without going through the Straits at all. The inland way is more direct. So the practice of sending the submarines through the Bosporus appears even less justified

Two Things strike me in that last quote

1. the Russian navy using the Bosporus as a normal route, this would be political in one sense exercising the rights of the Russian navy to use the straights

2. it would actually be cheaper to use the Bosporus and the submarines own power to get it from A to B, like I said earlier you need tugs and a dry dock carrier to navigate the shallower water in the Canals, this takes time, people, money and also equipment.