A drastic modernisation of the fleet was urgently required to meet the needs of mass freight traffic along the south-east transport routes, which were fully developed by 1955, and also to cope with the steadily increasing flows of western traffic. As the era of steam navigation was coming to an end for cost and rationalisation reasons, the Austrian shipyards in Linz and Korneuburg commissioned the construction of a number of new ships at end of the 1950s, which were to significantly improve the fleet’s capacity as regards machine capacity and deadweight capacity. First, conventional motor-driven tugboats and freight vessels were constructed, but as early as of 1964 a series of self-propelled vessels was launched and in 1969 the DDSG started to use the first pusher, MSS LINZ, with six pushed barges. The formation of so-called pushed convoys, i.e., self-propelled freight vessels which can reach a capacity of up to 10,000 tonnes on the lower and middle Danube together with several pushed barges, constituted a further rationalisation step.
While the DDSG used steamers for a period of 125 years, motor-driven tugboats were used for sailing for only about 30 years. With the transition to pusher crafts a very rapid technological change has taken place in inland navigation in the past three decades that has surpassed the comparable developments that took almost one-and-a-half centuries and has culminated today with the use of Ro-Ro vessels and LASH lighters.
In September 1992, a direct waterway from Rotterdam to Sulina was created by the opening of the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, which had already been under construction since 1922; this waterway gave rise to expectations of substantial economic advantages, which have only partly had an impact due to the political developments in Eastern Europe, and especially, in the Yugoslav Danube area. In addition, the different ownership structures of the Rhine and Danube shipping companies as well as the general trend of privatisation among the predominantly state-owned Danube shipping companies has resulted in drastic changes in ownership that can be illustrated using the example of the DDSG.
In spite of the massive restoration measures that impressively increased the transport volumes while significantly reducing the number of employees, the owner failed to improve the operating result due to stagnating tariffs. Therefore, in 1991 the decision was taken to restructure the company by outsourcing the operating divisions of freight and passenger traffic, and to sell these to private investors.
The DDSG-Cargo GmbH, which was sold to the German Stinnes shipping company in 1993, has meanwhile changed ownership again and its partly modernised ships travel along the entire Rhine-Danube area. The majority of the passenger ships of the DDSG-Donaureisen GmbH were sold to the new Blue Danube-Gmbh that was founded by the Port of Vienna and the Österreichisches Verkehrsbüro tourism company and concentrates its operations in the area of Vienna and the Wachau region; the other older vessels were purchased by private shipping companies, and most of them are still in use.
Since the decline of the DDSG, only a few shipping companies have become established as Austrian enterprises, with a part of the former Austrian fleet – mainly for labour law and wage reasons - being registered in Germany, Hungary and Slovakia.
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