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Captain Pegg

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Everything posted by Captain Pegg

  1. It’s nothing to do with maintenance since cuttings aren’t really maintainable. CRT have many miles of cuttings and they could if they so wished undertake lots of risk reduction work that is akin to a rebuild using vast amounts of money that they don’t have, never have had, and the public almost certainly wouldn’t want them to have. It would be capital funded work quite different from maintenance and it would consist of work such as devegetation, installation of toe walls, regrading, rock fill, slope drainage and crest drainage. But because of the relatively random nature of where and when slopes fail it’s far more cost effective to treat the places that do fail post event. It’s not like CRT have to pay damages for closing the canal. The parallel failure of the railway cutting that occurred the same week will have cost six figure sums in penalty payments yet there is a limit on what preventive work rail authorities can undertake and it often comes down to containment rather than prevention. The railway cutting concerned has a series of remediation works undertaken over many, many years but like Easenhall it’s a big cutting and it’s simply not practical to treat it all in a preventive manner. Climate change of course simply increases the likelihood of a failure, it doesn’t cause it.
  2. Clearly my humour detecting senses are conditioned to go into sleep mode when I log on to this site.
  3. Are they really? I don't think I've ever encountered a moving wide beam on that section. Just the one that used to moor at Willoughby before mooring of wide beams was prohibited.
  4. I’d forgotten about that. I thought @Stroudwater1 was referring to the widebeam notice as a closure notice.
  5. Unlikely as that would seem somewhat pointless and in any case isn’t it against the purpose of the rules that permit exceptional passage of widebeams? More pertinent is that the notice is clear about the nature of the movement and it only describes a one way journey. It’s not for me or anyone else to second guess the nature of the movement. I have simply queried it with CRT on the basis of the apparent discrepancy between the wording of the notice and CRT’s own rules.
  6. I’ve done that although I suspected a direct message to the relevant waterway manager might be more effective.
  7. There’s no closure. If I were due to be transiting this section on those dates - as it happens I’ll be south of Braunston - I wouldn’t change my plans one bit for this. That said the notice really ought to cover one single day as that’s the requirement for moving on that section. So who is the contact to raise that issue with?
  8. That’s a good point about mooring within the Tardebigge flight. The pound @agg221 is referring to is probably the one on the bend which is between locks 33 and 34 so five locks up the flight. I’ve moored there at least twice before and also once further up the flight near the lock cottage with the radio aerials and big dogs. There are other places suitable for mooring too, such as beneath the reservoir near lock 50. If you do end up mooring within the flight make sure there is plenty of water in the pound, check the gates and paddles are fully closed on the lock below and observe the water level when you arrive and perhaps every hour or two before you go to bed.
  9. We’ve covered this before on the forum. The idea that trees are helpful to slope stability is largely myth. A strong well rooted tree is likely to be beneficial but the type of slope they grow on is likely to be one that is well drained with deep soil and not at risk of failure. At risk slopes are generally poorly drained, shallow soil horizons overlying rock and the trees that grow on them have shallow roots which makes them susceptible to overturning by wind action. A combination of saturated soil and wind action on trees are common factors in slope failures. Early canal and railway embankments would likely have been constructed to a gradient of about 1:1.5. Modern slopes to something like 1:3. Early canal and railway cuttings mostly had crest drains that in most cases are long defunct. The nature of the land above the slope - both topographical and usage - is also critical. Particularly if the crest drainage is non-existent. Something as simple as changing the direction a field is ploughed can be a precursor to failure. On the railway de-vegetation is a key tool in the armoury of the Earthworks engineer. For starters it is an enabler to inspection. On the clay soil embankments of south-east England that are prone to seasonal desiccation any tree is bad news.
  10. That’s not what was said. The point was that if you hire from Calcutt or Napton you are “going south on that canal”. That canal in this case being the south Oxford. For the OPs requirements I think the options given by Tony were very sound.
  11. The slippage is nature’s way of stabilising the slope. It will have occurred primarily because of the level of saturation of the soil possibly coupled with wind action on the trees. A lot of water will have been released from within the slope so further slippage is not a huge risk in itself although removing material from the toe - which is the logical approach if plant arrives by boat - does carry some risk. Some crest drainage - temporary or permanent - would be a mitigation. A large diameter temporary pipe was installed at Shortwood to carry water coming down from above the tunnel past the site of the slip. It’s only a few hours from Rothen’s yard at Mancetter by boat which is how the immediate remedial works are likely to be approached.
  12. I travelled through Easenhall last Monday and noted the bulge in the gabion wall. The cutting slopes always show signs of recent movement. As for the stoppage notice it may be an attempt at appearing customer focussed but do CRT really have to consult their lockage statistics to know the north Oxford is a popular canal? From what I can see on the video it’s mostly the fallen tree that’s blocking the channel and material brought down with the root ball that’s across the towpath. It doesn’t look anywhere near as severe as the blockage at Shortwood in the autumn and that took weeks rather than months to reopen the navigation.
  13. Should the rivers be high there won’t necessarily be a choice to be made between the Avon or Stourport rings. Hire boats are only permitted when the rivers are on green boards. This is perhaps one reason to head clockwise if this is a risk since a trip to Stratford and potentially back via Birmingham may be a better alternative than to Worcester and back if the rivers are prohibitive. Noting though that the Severn and Avon have quite different catchments. As for mooring at Tardebigge there is plenty of very good mooring both above and below the top lock at what is a superb location. It just doesn’t have a pub.
  14. Oops. Left it too late to edit but obviously ‘weight’ should read ‘width’ in the above.
  15. It’s a common myth that preventing a suicide is merely delaying it. That is not the case. The fact that there has been a move toward fencing off platforms that are only used during times of perturbation and where trains pass at high speed is due to a combination of risks of allowing access to such. It isn’t just about suicides. I’ve also never directly heard of a specific link to stations with multiple platforms. These happen to be common in locations with high population.
  16. Staffs & Worcs bridges are on the whole quite generous compared to some other narrow canals. They are wider than the Shroppie and taller than the T&M. I can’t immediately think of a specific pinch point. In any case it really depends if your problem is simply overall height (in which case your limiting point is likely to be a flat soffited bridge) or having a cabin that combines both relative weight and height (in which case your limiting point is likely to be an arched bridge). The main risk is many of the arched bridges are relatively wide and flat so you could possibly come into contact with the arch if you go too far out on the offside. The published craft dimensions were originally derived from the size of boats using the waterway in the 1960s hence they do not directly reflect any specific piece of infrastructure unless a specific need to do so has arisen. The fact there is no specific information for Staffs & Worcs in the CRT dimensions is probably because there aren’t any known problems with headroom.
  17. I noted the clothes and the evident lack of a load which is what made it look odd to me. I assumed the tow rope had been omitted and didn’t consider that it was a modern image of a motorised butty. No harm in a bit of artistic licence and I’ll bet we’d all have to check if the engine house is visible from the artist’s viewpoint. Not sure what makes it “ethnic” but it is north Coventry.
  18. Be careful what you post in the History & Heritage section. Is it the boat or the skipper that qualifies this picture?
  19. Good work. It needs the correct information publishing to a useful level of detail.
  20. The technology may be but I don’t think the process has been used to make steel in any large volume in the UK until relatively recently. I don’t think it’s the reason Vauxhall cars were crap. That’s got far more to do with protection, or lack thereof. Anyway it’s not what this thread is about.
  21. Whatever the method of production and wherever it’s done the material from which steel is made is some form of contaminated iron. Be it carbon and sulphur in pig iron from a blast furnace or the rust and foreign bodies in scrap. In any case blast furnaces are charged with scrap to aid the smelting process. Steel making is mostly about removing the unwanted stuff and if that can’t be done then making sure it’s encapsulated in a form where it isn’t detrimental to the performance of the product is the next best thing. That is achieved by the addition of alloying elements. The idea that steel made from scrap is inferior is a myth that seems to stem from ignorance of how steel is made. To the best of my knowledge the electric arc furnace process is relatively new and there are only two major producers in the UK. Not sure any 1960s Vauxhalls would have used it.
  22. This is a confused statement. Steel made by the electric arc furnace method uses scrap as it's feed stock and hence is recycling carbon that is already locked into the alloy. That carbon has to exist in some form somewhere. It's doing no harm while chemically locked into a piece of metal. Steel made by the traditional method of converting pig iron made in a blast furnace introduces huge volumes of carbon into the atmosphere from the coke used to smelt the iron ore. Only a small proportion of the carbon gets locked into the pig iron and most of that is removed in the steel conversion process. Hence adopting new materials to limit the overall global requirement for steel while promoting the use of the electric arc process to recycle waste ferrous material into steel is a more environmentally friendly approach than just continuing to produce new metal from the smelting of ores.
  23. I’ve moored above Atherstone locks and I’ve also moored below the town locks many times and left my boat there unattended overnight. Access to shops and the station is why people choose to moor in the town rather than the countryside. I’ve also single handed the flight at various times of day including early and late and in near darkness. Never had even the slightest hint of a problem there. I also have no expectation of encountering Volockies after 1400, below lock 5, in inclement weather, or in winter.
  24. How were these locks drained, via gate paddles or ground paddles? If the latter it could explain why altering the top of lock was easier as that appears to be have been achieved without altering the original culverts. Also works to the bottom end of a lock might have required a lot more de-watering activity than alterations carried out inside the top gates.
  25. The Blisworth passage was this morning so any wide beams still north of Stowe Hill will certainly be struggling to make it.
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