I will not need to tell you that the traditional - and
almost universal - method of getting boats up and down hills is the pound-lock,
and until recently that looked set to be the case for the foreseeable future
(or at least until the pound-lock is replaced by the Euro-lock in a couple of
years time).
Ever since some bright spark thought of building the locks
on the Canal du Midi wider in the middle than at the ends, to match the shape
of the boats, successive generations of engineers have tried to improve on the
pound-lock. They have brought us the guillotine-lock, shaft-lock, stop-lock,
staircase-lock, and more recently the crook-lock (built by David Hutchings'
prison labour on the Avon), the ultra-secure mortise-lock and the utterly
terrifying dread-lock. But most of these have been minor modifications; rarely
has anyone ever come up with anything to beat the sheer simplicity of two sets
of gates separated by a short section of canal with three bollards in the wrong
place and a ten foot high sign carrying the name and logo of the navigation
authority.
Not that they haven't tried, of course. There have been many
attempts at producing an alternative to the lock, usually aimed at overcoming
steeper gradients, or saving time and water supplies. Some have been moderately
successful, others have been contenders for the Book of Heroic Failures. They
have usually fallen into one of three categories (and usually fallen into
dereliction too): vertical lifts, inclined planes, and water slopes. As a
recent draft I saw of an ISG leaflet says, "otters have been tried but
proved unsuccessful". I think that should say "others have been
tried...", but as there have been both human-powered and horse-powered boat
lifts in the past, I can't be certain. (Best not to suggest it if your
restoration scheme is running into opposition from the nature conservationists,
though!)
Anyway, of the three main categories, vertical lifts have
been in the news most recently, with the welcome announcement that Anderton is
to be restored. Elsewhere in Europe several vertical lifts are still at work,
and a new one under construction at Strepy-Thieu in Belgium is all set to break
the records for height, length, width, cost and construction time. (they've
been building it for longer than Anderton's been shut!) The statistics quoted
about it are endless - its 250ft height, the 1350 ton barges it will carry, the
approach aqueducts that are longer than Pontcysyllte, twice as high as
Pontcysyllte, and even harder to pronounce correctly... but the statistic that
comes up most often is that the size of the flat roof on top of it is bigger
than a football pitch. In fact, it is rumoured that Anderlecht FC were
interested in its possibilities, and only went off the idea when they realised
how much of each game would be spent retrieving the ball for every throw-in,
corner or goal-kick.
The second category - the inclined plane - hasn't been in
the news quite so much, but the Foxton Inclined Plane Trust hope to change all
that. And inclined planes feature in several other restoration schemes
including the Whitchurch Arm and the Chesterfield. (Well, actually it is said
that the Chesterfield one started out horizontal, but ended up as an inclined
plane due to mining subsidence) And down on the Bude Canal, they hope to
reinstate their original design of incline, with the boats fitted with flanged
wheels, so that they can run on rails up and down the plane without the need
for caissons or cradles. (Apparently they're planning to hold a National
Railboat Festival next year.) Elsewhere, it is said that some canal restoration
projects plan to take this idea a stage further and save even more water by
continuing the rails along the entire canal instead of water. Then the boats
don't need to be steered, and they can be linked together in 'trains'... I
can't see that one catching on, myself...
The third design - the water slope - is a bit of a misnomer,
as the water doesn't actually slope; instead a 'wedge' of water with the boat
floating in it is pushed up a sloping channel by a pair of locomotives on rails
each side of the channel. But some of the early American canals really did have
'water slopes' - the boats made a rather hazardous journey down a kind of
flume, and hit the bottom with a big splash. Perhaps Alton Towers or Disneyland
could be persuaded to sponsor something similar on one of our canal restoration
schemes. One problem with this type of water-slope is that there is no way of
getting back up again - the early American ones got round this idea by building
new boats at the top, carrying all their cargo downstream, and breaking up the
boats for timber at the bottom. Maybe in this disposable day and age, the
disposable razor, disposable camera and disposable contact lenses will be
followed by the use-once-and-throw-away disposable narrow boat.
A major incentive for finding new ways of taking canals up
and down hills has been the recent legislation that will require British
Waterways and the other navigation authorities to apply for abstraction
licences and pay money to the Environment Agency for the privilege of using
their own water from their own supplies for their own canals. And if you have
any doubts about how serious this is, remember that it includes all water
supplies, not just those for boats. Consider the amount of tea drunk by all the
BW dredger crews you ever see on the canals. Now the abstraction money paid by
BW for the water for each cup of tea may not amount to very much. But when you
add up all the cups consumed by all the members of each crew throughout the
system, and total it up for a whole year, it adds up to a considerable sum.
Enough - so the IWAAC boffins tell me - to pay for 14½ new four-storey
floating restaurants, or the demolition of 93 unnecessary old canalside
buildings, or the erection of the 17,834 new 'Danger no fishing - high voltage
overhead cables' signs needed to equip the rest of the Grand Union system.
Incidentally, on the subject of these notices, my mole in
Watford tells me that the original plan was to install these signs everywhere
that there were existing overhead wires, and also everywhere that anyone might
conceivably want to install them, so that even if somebody sneaked a power-line
in while BW weren't looking, they still wouldn't be liable for any anglers who
barbecued themselves. Now, however, it seems that the legal department have
been consulted and their learned opinion is that such actions would be a case
of 'crying wolf', and BW are legally only allowed (and required) to erect the
signs when there is a genuine risk of electrocution of anglers. Unfortunately,
for three months of the year during the fishing 'closed season' there is no
such risk as there are no anglers. Hence the plans to abolish the closed
season, to avoid the legal requirement to take down the signs every March and
re-erect them every June. Hence also - it is said - the decision to make the
signs out of good quality timber rather than aluminium or plastic - that way,
most of them will have disappeared into the back-cabin stoves of the
all-year-round trad boating fraternity by the time the close season starts,
thereby saving BW the bother of removing them.
But I digress. According to my old mate the working boatman
Harry Washerjosher, still hard at work on the lucrative Watford to Crumpsall
waste-paper run, a few interesting snippets have appeared in his cargo that
give the impression that BW are busy planning the replacement of many of the
existing lock flights with various novel designs of boat lift, in a bid to
evade these abstraction fees entirely.
Some sketch-maps of the Worcester & Birmingham Canal
appear to indicate that a roller-coaster boat-railway is intended to replace
the canal's longest lock flight - it will be called the 'Tarde-Big-Dipper'. A
memo that at first sight appeared to be something to do with Buckby cans turned
out to in fact concern a terrifying boat-propelling contraption called the
"Buckby-cannon". And it would appear that the 'Wolverhampton Corkscrew' isn't -
as one might imagine - Black Country slang for a device to open child-proof
meths bottles; it is a new design of helical boat-lift to replace the 21 locks,
which will soon have boats spiralling upwards almost as steeply as their
licence fees.
Now these ideas might seem far-fetched, but they are
obviously being taken very seriously in Watford - most of the memos are marked
in the margin as 'Credible, Realistic And Practical'. At least, that's what I
assume the acronym stands for.
All over the system the story is the same. Soon we will have
the Etruria Escalator, the Crofton Crane, the Hurleston Hurler and the Stockton
See-saw... and whatever the BW research team devises for Devizes!
But a word of caution before we get too carried-away. I
really can't believe that Antonine Wheel thing in Scotland. Come on now, guys -
that's got to be a joke! Hasn't it?
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