magpie patrick

The Chesterfield Canal Trust are designing new locks (well, one lock) at the moment. Might be worth talking to them

Me too! @John Brightley - do you have a subscription? aha!

The lock has reappeared...

I've never heard of it! Can't quite make out the cover dates but seems to be monthly? Whether they are worth buying on spec would depend in part on how much the vendor wants for them - at a few quid I'd have a punt, at £100 I wouldn't

In History and Heritage as I can't think where else to put it. I have in mind CRT remainder waterways that are not navigable and haven't been for some time, but are still obviously canals. The Swansea Canal is one, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal summit level is another. First question is, can anyone identify any others? I'm aware that CRT have land holding and assets that are not canals at all (although in some instances these once were canals) - I'm not thinking of these. Second, what impediments are there to CRT disposing of these? What hoops would they have to go thorugh to transfer these to a conservation group or (at the opposite extreme) a developer? I'm asking as, in some instances, CRT ownership is proving unhelpful to their restoration/preservation and am wondering whether some kind of transfer might be an option.

I'd only heard that in the context of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, where there are slubberdegullions on squeaky feet - I'd assumed they had made it up!

Along with another consultant some years ago I suggested BW create moorings along the Lee and charge for them - they weren't really interested. I also notice that, despite the protest from so many barely moving CCrs that they don't want a mooring, the problem is most acute where there is a shortage of moorings. Usually, such as Bath and London, it's not just that they are all full, but there aren't that many in the first place. I also suggested at one point that a restored Somersetshire Coal Canal could provide a lot of permanent moorings within ten miles of Bath, as the entire canal loops round such that Paulton Basin is only 8.9 miles from Bath by road even though it's more like 15 miles by canal

When I bought my Brompton it cost more than the value of the car it was going in - but it would fit in the boot of a P reg Vauxhall Corsa (which was what I had at the time) and would unfold in seconds. Dad also bought a folding bike for holidays but his was more a bike that came apart, I would put mine together for an hour's bike ride, his you put together at the start of a week's holiday as it took half an hour to get it unfolded and assembled - AND mine was smaller folded! The Brompton has outlive the Corsa by 19 years so far.... Sometimes expensive is money well spent, but not always, and there is a limit. I don't think I'd pay much more for a better Brompton, ads i'm not sure how much use the "better" would be

I think these are they? They were developed by the Mon & Brec trust to give long lasting gates that satisfied heritage requirements - on locks that will see little use wooden gates might only get used a couple of dozen times before they fall apart. https://mbact.org.uk/modular-lock-gates/

If I was younger and in good health I'd join them! I too have been high up on mountain sides with a road tourer that has narrow tyres and dropped handle bars... It probably saved me really, the route I'd plotted went off a cliff and I was going slowly enough to brake in time

You can get round that by adapting your posting style - easier on a laptop than a phone I grant you but for example In answer to Donald Duck's point about weed getting in his bill I've found that using a bill-filter gave reasonably good results To Mickey Mouse, I'm afraid the CRT's mousetraps in the Everglades are a fact of life, and if you can't deal with them then perhaps you need to do your boating elsewhere If I'm quoting someone I try and put the quote first, and I try to put my general points in before the quote, so my post would run drivel from me about the general quality of Everglades mousetraps Response to Mickey Mouse

What model boat is it - mine is a Viking 23 and it has ribs in the roof that are only apparent when the headlining is removed. The lights in the original fit out were all mounted in the gaps between the ribs so the cables could also run in the gaps.

Only just catching up with this - haven't been to BCLM for a while but I did notice when we were in Scotland that everything was around £20-£25 each - £40-£50 for a couple, the most expensive per minute was probably the Loch Ness exhibition at Drumnadrochit (£20 each for a 50 minute tour) and comfortably the least expensive was Cawdor Castle at around £15 each, we spent three hours there and could have stayed longer in the gardens Mind you, the vintage vinyl record shop in Nairn was probably the most expensive of the lot...

I hear you, but my point remains - we've come to expect a far higher standard. It is perfectly possible to cycle miles down canal towpaths on an old Brompton, mine is now 24 years old, three speed and has done hundreds if not thousands of towpath miles (well, maybe just over a thousand). Many, even most of those miles would be grassy, muddy or slippery and some potholed. In that time I had people tell me there were far better bikes for the job, but strangely all the posh bikes never seemed to get to the places I went. I'm not convinced this new Brompton will either - it's far more down to a spirit of adventure than to the kit you use.

One would be foolish to keep it outside - I have kept my Brompton in the cabin even on Juno (23 foot Viking GRP cruiser) Can I just add - I think people are getting soft, my Brompton has been on all sorts of rough and muddy surfaces... people seem to expect comfort and I just don't understand it!

Overall, our waterways need purpose if they are going to survive - and ideally purpose that pays for their upkeep. I'm looking at this elsewhere with a derelict but in water (and just about navigable to canoes) canal that may become part of a storm water relief scheme - if it does the canal will have to kept clear to have the conveyance, and this means it will also be navigable at least by small boats - if it doesn't happen my guess is nature will take over and eventually it will be lost. This is similar but on a much bigger scale - the water company won't want a weeded up undredged canal, and thus there is a wider incentive to keep it going. Why would it be anyone other than the water company? One of the (very few) benefits of both privatisation of utilities and the denationalisation of CRT is that there can be some serious horse-trading on matters like this, whereas the treasury used to be against payments from one government body to another even when one was benefiting the other hard up.

Just to comment - I use the auto-merge as a feature to enable posts with multiple pics, as the maximum file size is easily exceeded in just one post. Some of my posts such as the Highlands holiday would make a lot less sense without post merge. Sometimes the best thing to do with an irritating feature is to embrace it and use it to your advantage, which I find true in life as well as on the forum....

L'art pour l'art - I'd rather individuality than dull conformity, even though it means I won't like everything. Art brightens the world up, and this one has got people talking about the canal at Tinsley.

The part of the basin the wheel docks in (or at Anderton, the caisson drops into) is dry - separated from the rest of the canal by a gate. When the tank carrying the boat is in place a gate on the tank and one on the canal opens - the same arrangement as at the top. If the area the wheel landed in was flooded a lot more power would be needed to complete the circle as the lift would no longer balance. The Lynton and Lynmouth cliff railway is powered by filling a tank on the descending carriage - that said filling those beaks with water and emptying them again would probably be a lot of faff and a bit of a maintenance liability! Having been in brainstorming workshops for similar projects I'll bet someone did think of it though, and it would have been worked through

The bottom basin is dry, like Anderton. A neat trick might have been to fill the top beak with water, and drain it out of the lower one, the lift could then rotate on the descending weight. I don't know whether they thought of that.

I guess there is a slightly higher instance of locks being turned without a boat in them if there are two available, but it's more likely that the one taken out of use has been ashed up or similar to reduce leakage.