Richard Fairhurst

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When was this sighting, Trish? (And any idea if he was heading north or south?) Richard (Charlbury, Oxfordshire)

Every lock between Kilby Bridge and Kings Lock is fitted with them - nine in all - with padlocks on both ground and gate paddles. The odd one is snapped off but most are still working. Personally I prefer the T-keys, and if you have a decent size crew it's worth getting a BW key for each one. You can do Kilby Bridge through to Loughborough in a day if you're keen!

Yes, padlocks from Kilby Bridge to Kings Lock on the GU Leicester Line (BW key), nothing north of there until the Erewash.

I'd second most of the above. We moor in Burton (I work there too ) and there's some excellent cruising. We've just come back from a week up the Soar, continuing past Leicester to Foxton and back; the Birmingham Ring via Great Haywood, Birmingham and Fazeley is also a week's cruise; then there's the Trent, the Erewash, and so on. It's also handy that there's a no-hassle day route - just one little lock at Dallow Lane gets you a long lock-free pound through Willington (good pub) to Stenson. The only downside is that, as pagan witch says, high levels in the Trent can prevent you from getting to Alrewas. MarkAdrian - not sure about your comment re: padlocks. There are certainly no padlocks between Stenson and Sawley (haven't been through to Nottingham yet). Sawley is electrified so needs a BW key if you pass through when the lock-keeper isn't on duty. The Erewash needs a T key, although Trent Lock at least is operable without (the ground paddles are padlocked, the gate paddles aren't).

There's at least one company working on that. I suspect this latest escapade will make several hire fleets look at it very seriously.

Complete nonsense. We thought we'd offer a second April Fool for our more techy readers!

Thanks all - a really nice surprise to come back after a week on the Soar and read this. Carl, I agree with you about interesting historic boats deserving their own articles... watch this space!

Though your avatar is the same as that of Ratty, the Towpath Talk forum admin, and you are from the same part of the world! (not that I mind) If I may be allowed a little plug of my own, there's an article on connecting to the Internet in the forthcoming (May) WW. cheers Richard

Yes, I used to get them too. Eventually I got exasperated and sent them a response which involved the words "p-ss-up" and "brewery". Since then they've not bothered us at all...

Only on a lowloader. Or round the coast.

Brandon Lock on the Little Ouse; and the 'southern' Middle Level route (which is probably better classified as intermittently navigable!).

Yes, there is another one in the letters pages - well spotted! If it's any consolation you're definitely not the only ones to be fooled - rumour has it a certain Government department was taken in, too...

I think Greg found he didn't have enough time for the updates site any more and wouldn't mind handing it on to someone. As another approach, I'm involved as a volunteer with the OpenStreetMap project... the idea there is that if you find something wrong on the map, you correct it yourself (a bit like Wikipedia).

Well, exactly - I draw the base canal lines in WW's maps by reference to the Ordnance Survey of the 1950s (as per here)...

That's how we (or, at least, Alec) worked out that Hagley was Hagley...! Fuzzyduck - have you asked Jem Bates?

That said, there's a bunch of people trying to run direct trains from Wrexham and Shropshire to London at the moment. They wanted to stop at Wolverhampton. Virgin have said "oh no you don't" and blocked them, on the basis that no-one but Virgin Trains has the right to run from Wolverhampton to Birmingham. Branson's not as pro-competition as he might make out.

Fortunately not true overall, though if there's any individual outlets which are proving problematic I'd like to know about it. You can go to www.abc.org.uk and check our respective news-stand sales if you like. (Very roughly, WW sells 17,000 copies per month, CB sells 13,000. Subscription numbers are largely equal for the two titles, so the difference is almost entirely single-copy sales.) I've been to a couple of WHSs recently (Banbury, Reading) that have actually sold out of WW, but that's quite a nice problem to have. On the adverts front, I know we have a lot of ads but it doesn't actually mean we have any less editorial. Typically we run 75pp of editorial a month, which is easily the match of the other magazines and twice what WW had when it started. One of the differences between us and CB/C&R is that we run all our editorial together, whereas the others intersperse it with adverts. That means we get a big chunk of 40 or so pages before you get to the start of the editorial. Last time I asked here, people said they actually preferred it that way, but we're always happy to listen to suggestions. Same goes for the magazine in general - let me know what you'd like to see. cheers Richard editor, WW

Good service, I agree, but just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for everyone! My licence took (IIRC) more like three weeks to arrive last autumn.

We had a problem on our town website a while back where people were trying that. We've largely solved it by making people's IP addresses public, and displaying them next to every post. It's not 100% foolproof but does make people think twice.

I'm afraid you've lost me there. Can you remind me what it was?