DRP

Hooray! What a relief! You must have been getting nearly desperate enough to take one of the facetious offers to take it off your hands!

What a fantastic collection of pictures!Thanks for posting the link.I've already whiled away a couple of hours on them.

Lighten up Ronaldo. It's only sh*t. Once you've gone through the emptying and swilling out routine a few times, it won't be there any more. Be thankful you didn't know what an Elsan was - a toilet seat fixed above a 5-gallon bucket, in which you could observe not only the results of your own struggles, floating around, but everyone else's too!

Could have been because the gates wouldn't go back, because of lack of maintenance.Sometimes, old fat boats have to paint their rubbing strips with stern tube grease,just to get anywhere. You'll know how I know that.

Clue: the widest bit of a narrow boat. You're right, I was saying a lot of the blame for the damage lies with boaters; but they're not the ones responsible for making repairs, and most of the repairs to locks in Wigan and surrounding area have been outstanding for several years.If jobs are prioritised at CRT headquarters, then local management should be banging the drum harder.

You may have unwittingly hit on the answer. Fit all boats with a holding tank/digester, and run the engine on the gas produced. Simples!

Presumably when CRT employed contractors to do this work, they included the requirement to clear up after themselves when the job was done. Obviously they haven't done this ( why would you when you knew they were going to fill it with water?). Surely the answer is to get them back and make them remove the rocks and rubbish( at their own expense), and then never employ them again. It's more likely we'll get their usual line, "we have to remember the waterways are there for everyone to enjoy; not just boaters".

Why can't CRT pull their fingers out and fix the leakages? This is a CRT management issue, not the fault of the employees on the ground.The broken ground paddle on the bottom lock at Poolstock, with resulting constant silting up causing the top gate to be impossible to open, has been an issue for at least three years.Local staff have cleared it with a sludge pump when given notice, but this is not an answer. The management has been using the fatuous story about nocturnal vandals deliberately draining pounds, but every body knows it is a combination of leaky gates and careless boaters leaving paddles up that is the cause of water loss. This could be sorted by a single trip up or down the flight after lock up to check all paddles are down. Additionally, fairly casual inspection of the gates reveals that most of them have damage to the mitres 10 to 24 inches above the surface of the water. Any body guess what's causing that? If you're not very good at steering a 6ft 10ins boat through a gap of 7ft or more, maybe you could open both gates before coming out of, or going in to locks. The fact remains that most of the blame for the shocking state of the Wigan flight lies with CRT, and the irksome restrictions on use of the flight do nothing to encourage people to visit the Leeds & Liverpool canal. on several occasions we have seen people arrive at the bottom of the flight with hours of daylight to spare, and some luckless lock keeper on the receiving end of their dissatisfaction. Don't CRT understand that boaters are not all retired "baby-boomers" whose time can just be wasted willy-nilly? Many visitors,especially hire-boaters have only a limited time for their holiday, and don't want to waste half a day or more of it hanging about in some unprepossessing bit of Wigan. Perhaps CRT has the ultimate goal of making the canal so unattractive to visitors that they have an excuse to do even less maintenance than they do at present.

At risk of hi-jacking this thread. . . With Roger and several others, we formed group called Friends of Thomas years ago, with the aim of recovering and eventually restoring Thomas. The newly-appointed BW manager at Castleford was keen to help, and was all set to pursue the process of BW taking over ownership of the boat.He even offered to get BW's crane barge into the pool below the weir to assist, but found they couldn't get it through the road bridge. After this, the word was we could still have it if we could recover it, but we couldn't go onto the weir in case we damaged it and brought the Navigation to a halt(!). A lot of ingenious theorising ensued, but we were never able to progress further. Some time later, on a family trip on the Bridgewater canal, we were filling up at a water point when another narrowboat appeared and tied up waiting for us to go.The conversation went: Narrow boater: "I'm getting a barge off British Waterways" Me:"That's great. Are you getting it off the tender list?" Boater:" No. It's stuck on the weir at Castleford. They said I can have it if I can get it off" Me:"Oh, it's a short boat!" Boater:" Oh no, it's a right big 'un - sixty foot, at least!" (sorry, Moderators. If there's anymore Thomas chat, maybe we should start another thread).

That's the Thomas, a short boat built by Harkers of Knottingley,for Walter Holden, a Skipton coal merchant.She replaced a steamer, and although there is debate about whether she actually had a steam engine, I am pretty sure I've seen pictures of her bearing the chimney and plumbing of a steam engine. She had an Armstrong Siddeley diesel engine when she went over the weir. She was owned by Bernard Jessop, and carrying scaffolding tubes, when tied up above the weir one night, some dead-heads undid the mooring ropes. The boat drifted on to the weir, and was carried over by floodwater. She was left sitting on the flat concrete run-off. The owner was able to unload the cargo, and planned to try to get her off, but the river flooded again, and carried her over onto the rocks with the stern under water. Over the years she has steadily filled with rubbish, and rust has done a pretty good job of destroying her. The terrible shame is that steps were not taken to recover her when the millennium footbridge was built and all the work was carried out on the weir .What a lost opportunity!

On canals, I'd agree that the usefulness of the buoyancy aspect is debateable, and many of the lifejackets on the market do seem to encase the dog in a rigid tube. But it is vital to have something to get hold of when getting them out, as you're seldom near a convenient horse creep when they fall in. We've always put our dogs in well-fitting harnesses when boating.They don't impede them in any way, but provide you with a secure handle if needed. On our first trip in our own boat, we came upon a group of hysterical children whose golden retriever had jumped in after a ball, and couldn't get out because the coping stones were in good condition. Getting a panic-stricken, saturated golden retriever out of the water was an experience never to be forgotten. Hence the harness policy ever since.

Whilst I share the already-expressed disdain for Halfords, my experience of our local Maplins has always been good,with the staff helpful, knowledgable and prepared to go and ask someone else when they don't know. It has been disappointing to see the shop increasingly taken over by rubbish like drones and electric pedal cars, but alas we just have to accept that the market for components has shrunk in the same way that the market for model-making supplies has shrunk, as the boomers who used to make things become extinct - or join the ranks of the bewildered! I'll be sad if Maplins goes down the pipes; but there's still eBay as a useful source of bits.

The explanation I've seen for the phenomenon of 00, is that when h0 was introduced, it worked fine for Continental prototypes, but its scale of 3.5mm to the foot meant that the smaller British prototype locomotives would be too small to accommodate the mass-produced miniature electric motors that were avilable at the time.Increasing the scale to 4mm meant that the motors would fit, but keeping the gauge at"half 0" made the locos and rolling stock look too big for the track - stimulating the sticklers for accuracy to embark on the quest for "fine scale", when todays wide range of tiny electric motors(mostly made in China), became available. Now retaining information like that is real anorakism !

Yes, fine in every sense of the word. We thought she was too fine to have been just a maintenance boat. and from the riveted bulkheads at either end of the hold, we hoped she might turn out to be something exotic like a passenger boat. We never made any real progress with the history. Still, as long as Mrs Day has her she'll be safe from anyone putting an engine in her, so there's still hope of a proper restoration if her true identity is revealed in the future.

Here's the "Ian" model Sadly, in rather better condition than the real Ian.

There was at least one iron narrow boat built in Yorkshire; the Elland, which the Horseboating Society has now. We rescued her from British Waterways in 1992, when she was at Marsden on the Huddersfield Narrow canal - a completely bare hull, being used as a mud boat. 60 feet long, maximum beam 6feet 10 ins. constructed of rivetted wrought iron, and not a straight line anywhere. The plating was in very good condition, with only a couple of thin areas requiring repairs to be let in. The work was done at the yard of the late and much-missed Roger Lorenz. Roger had another life in Materials Science, and was able to use his contacts to get a sample of the plate analysed, revealing that it came from the Low Moor Ironworks near Bradford. Produced about 1850 to 1890.(Don't ask me how they knew that!). The best guess of West Yorkshire barge enthusiasts was that she had been built at Bottom Boat, on the river Calder, as she had the same "boiler rivets " as wide boats built there. With no more information to go on, we set about a best- guess rebuild, and produced a butty boat which went so well it could have been towed by someone on a skateboard. we sold her some years ago, and would have forgotten her until stumbling upon some BW archive pictures whilst googling for some thing else. Showing kids playing in a boat stranded by the breach that closed the Barnsley canal. So the mystery continues. . .

Very interested to see you're thinking of trying a Dynastart on a National. The Northwest's favourite surveyor for historic boats has just suggested I consider one for a Russell Newbery, as a way to reduce the coronary risk! He suggested taking the advice of Mr. Middleton, in Manchester. I'm very much looking forward to report of how you get on.

Blimey, if this is a first attempt, what will they be like when you've had a bit of practice?! You'll have 'em queueing up the towpath. Well done.

Little One, Have you come across Arthur Beale, http://www.arthurbeale.co.uk/acatalog/index.html, of Shaftesbury Avenue, in London? In case you don't know them, they have a tiny shop around the corner from Covent Garden Tube station.This is an absolute Aladdin's cave of boaty stuff(admittedly more yachty than canal- boaty), but they do stock an impressive range of soft cotton line in various sizes, ideal for decorative work. I'm sure they do mail order, but if you can think of an excuse for going to London, they're well worth a visit.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I'd expect a tiller to last a bit longer than 15 months, especially if the boat's been out of the water for 12 of those. 15 months is "new" from my viewpoint.

Didn't the OP say this is a new boat? Surely the answer is to call the seller and tell him to come and fix it; failing that, a solicitors letter and the threat of naming on this forum ought to help.

Oh really ? And here's me thinking that politicians are just the vacuous gobshites that sign whatever the Civil Servants tell them to sign; take the credit if the Media like it; and the blame, if they don't. Surely all businesses with large legal departments pay the least they can get away with.