billh
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Posts posted by billh
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24 minutes ago, Ray T said:
Springy, thank you. It gives me an excuse to model Adder, perhaps?
Cowburn and Cowper had some metal tanker boats but AIUI these boats had long tanks in the holds which carried carbon disulphide for Courtaulds.
The tanks in the C & C boats looked very similar in size to the ones in their road tanker fleet in the 50s and 60s .Scammel tractor units with quite small trailers. Which came first,tanks in boats or tanks on the road?
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Continuing the stop plank discussion, I remember in 1969 , canal carpenter, Ben Wagstaffe knocked up a set of stop planks in about half a hour. He cut them to length with a hand saw, bevelled the ends very neatly with an adze and nailed the metal handles on . We had them fitted (in a drained lock )within an hour.
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A stone cill was provided in the bottom of the canal, to seat the first stop plank. In later years this cill often got covered in debris preventing the plank from sitting down . This problem was partly solved by leaving the bottom plank in place permanently , which is ok until a deep boat , combined with a low water level gets stuck on the plank or even destroys it! DAMHIK.
There is a special tool for cleaning the stop plank grooves- a stout wooden pole with a squared off metal clad spade shaped tip , the same width as a stop plank.
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On 27/03/2024 at 08:21, Heartland said:
Fireless Locomotives were once a common sight at some industrial locations, made by firms such as Andrew Barclay and others.
The Clayton Aniline Company , next to the Ashton Canal had a fireless loco, using steam from their own large boiler house. There was a quite extensive railway system within the works with , eventually, two independant mainline railway connections (LMS and LNER). By the 1970s the Company were drawing a million gallons a day from the canal which was not returned .A good earner for British Waterways at the time. All gone now, part of the Etihad football enterprise.😞
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I've taken a 70ft boat into the top lock of the Huddersfield Broad, didn't go down though. 😃. ISTR we had to reverse back to the incinerator to turn as Patrick says. Part of a trip from Ashton to Huddersfield and return twenty odd years ago.
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The first LNER maintainance motor boat Joel, was a conversion from a wooden horseboat in 1927:
https://collections.canalrivertrust.org.uk/bw192.3.1.31.1.10
The various pictures of Joel in the 1930s show its origins very clearly. The engine was a Kelvin E2 petrol/paraffin engine of 9HP.
The boat was scrapped in 1948, as "worn out" and replaced by the present wooden motor taking the same name.
1 minute ago, billh said:The first LNER maintainance motor boat Joel, was a conversion from a wooden horseboat in 1927:
https://collections.canalrivertrust.org.uk/bw192.3.1.31.1.10
The various pictures of Joel in the 1930s show its origins very clearly. The engine was a Kelvin E2 petrol/paraffin engine of 9HP.
The boat was scrapped in 1948, as "worn out" and replaced by the present wooden motor taking the same name.
1 minute ago, billh said:The first LNER maintainance motor boat Joel, was a conversion from a wooden horseboat in 1927:
https://collections.canalrivertrust.org.uk/bw192.3.1.31.1.10
The various pictures of Joel in the 1930s show its origins very clearly. The engine was a Kelvin E2 petrol/paraffin engine of 9HP.
The boat was scrapped in 1948, as "worn out" and replaced by the present wooden motor taking the same name.
ETA: the later Joel was also a conversion from a horseboat possibly Emma no 9 in 1948.
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3 hours ago, davidg said:
The tool in use is a brake stick, a specialised tool for use as a lever to apply brakes. A shunter's pole is a longer round pole with a pig's tail hook on the end for lifting three link couplings over coupling hooks and deftly twisting the pole to disengage the pig's tail.
Yes, I know all that. I was pointing out that the railway shunter's pole transferred to a canal use and could also be used as a brake stick, probably with a short life in that application😄
I can see how my original post could be misunderstood,sorry.
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The canal to railway use works the other way as well: Shunter's pole, for coupling wagons ( and applying brakes as shown) makes an ideal tool for decluttering props on boats without a new-fangled weed hatch.
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On 04/03/2024 at 12:52, Tracy D'arth said:
A bit slow answering.
Alternators will run happily in reverse with the right fan on if need be, so it could be fitted facing backwards instead of normal.
Link belts mean that you can fit a belt without taking the drive shaft and/or gearbox off.
A bit of a side issue , if I may ask? We have an A 127 alternator on a slow running engine, V belt running on the flywheel rim, no groove. The alternator runs opposite direction to "normal", that is anti-clockwise looked at from the pulley end and works ok if a little hot at times. I have yet to find the correct rotation fan for this, any ideas for a source? The power demands of the boat are quite modest.
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Edith was motorized in 1927, as you say this was before the Kelvin diesels were in production. Kelvins that were available at that time included the new models E, F and G paraffin engines . It occurs to me that possibly 2 x model F4 or 2 x G2 , at about 30 HP each may have been installed? Examples of 2x F4s were in passenger boats on the Thames and the mail boat on Loch Lomond still has them as far as I know. As soon as the K diesels came along they would have offered much better fuel economy but cost of new engines would be a big consideration. Are we sure that a diesel was installed? I cant see some kind of chain drive working reliably with all that torque from a K. How about a hydraulic drive, one pump on the engine, 2 motors for the props? Hydraulics became "a thing" after the its rapid development for aircraft in WW2. And you could put one prop in forward and one in reverse for a sharp turn!
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5 minutes ago, jonesthenuke said:
Just a thought, but are there any derelict locks that would give an idea of construction and design? I am thinking of the scenario where part of the walls have collapsed, thus allowing an insight into brickwork thickness etc.
Aye, there's one at Marple right now, Lock 7, probably others on the flight in the near future😟
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A very interesting chap. He gave a talk that I attended a couple of years ago, he started as a truck driver for a haulage firm and built up the Manchester Cabins firm later. Have a look at his steam powered Land Rover and interesting things in his garden! A worthy successor to Fred Dibnah with an infectious laugh😃
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4 minutes ago, BEngo said:
The 1500 V DC electrification was planned and the overheads designed when the LNER owned and ran the Woodhead line. The LNER also owned the Ashton Canal (with a depot in Gorton Tank) so it was probably not a hard ask to use the Ashton towpath for the gantries.
The stretch of railway from Manchester to Glossop was re-electrified at 25 kV AC after the DC line closed through Woodhead. Some at least of the DC gantries were re-used.
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The railway certainly were in charge of the canal up until nationalisation, the canal staff were answerable to the District Engineer at Guide Bridge Station, I have several items of correspondence between the Canal Inspector (George Lucas) and the DE.
The electrification of the route between Guide Bridge and Stalybridge is set to go live (25kV AC) in a month's time. All the gantries on the main line next to the picture have been replaced with new, the original DC wiring only reached Dukinfield Central Station providing a head shunt for the Brookside sidings.The siding alongside the towpath gave rail access to the Prince's Dock about 200 yards away. The last use of this dock was loading 12 tons of coal into NB Joel for distribution to the various lock keepers then resident on the canal.
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11 hours ago, Ian Mac said:
Without getting my screwdriver out the hull does not look too bad, after all it was all new thirty years ago, so most of it should not be dreadful. The cabin is a mess, but then so is ours, however you would need to be fairly skilled or have inside knowledge to know that, as we do constant maintenance (*after a fashion!)
The problem here is that a boat is a living thing, whilst it is a boat, and museums and their staff in the main are not about living things, they are about conservation and preservation, that said the BCLM should have a better clue as the have the word Living in the title, and lots of stuff there is in fact modern replicas and working examples, so they should have been better able to couple with a boat. Wooden boats require constant maintenance, a docking and a good coat of looking at every year or so. The BCLM has not done this for a number of reasons, mainly I suspect because the a) could not afford it and b) did not know they had to - back to being in a Museum and how senior staff are trained to think.
So they will now need deep pockets, or to choose another path, and make it a static exhibit on the bank, but that will cost too.
What I do know is that we have over the last fifty odd years currently spent well less than a quarter of the money that has been expended on Gifford. However we have done the work ourselves, which is were the major cost comes from. Also Gifford has been in a higher standard of presentation than we have, for longer, but we have done considerably more miles. Once of a day we were allowed to play with her, taking her to rallies all over the place. They were magic times.
I attach a happy image.
Location is Pottinger Street Bridge , Ashton Canal. Gartside's Brookside Brewery stood where the new sheds are under construction, the brewery used water drawn from the Jeremy Brook which passes under the canal and railway at this point. The mill in the background was used by Hall & Kay Ltd who were air conditioning and ventilation engineers originally for cotton mills for dust extraction and fire prevention. Building demolished about 1985. Extreme left is an electrification gantry , part of the BR Woodhead system opened in 1954, closed 1981. Interesting is the fact that the vertical part of the gantry was fastened down to the towpath. Ian, I'm guessing the picture is about 1982?
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CRT will be notified by the Local Authority when a planning application is made. I realize you need to know beforehand what their take is .
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I remember seeing one of them being loaded at one of the factories near Stoke, probably 1977. the goods were on trolleys wheeled onto the boat via a short ramp which was hinged I think to the boat and held vertically when under way. The other boat was moored up at the other end of the journey . Much more recently on a visit to the Caldon , the unloading ( ?) point was still extant at the derelict site of the factory.
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The dock could be extended using that Smalley 360/5 digger mounted on the ex BW workboat 🙂
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16 hours ago, john.k said:
The big Rustons in cranes used to have little bowls that swung aside in the intake manifold of each head ....each bowl had a coil of wicking in it,which was saturated with diesel , and lit on fire...........I have never seen one used ,and one of my jobs was to remove the bowls ,and make blanking plates for the holes ,as the manager did not like the idea of crane drivers having permission to light fires in the cranes.
Bin there done that! 3VRH,(roughly equal to Lister JP3) light a fire in the bowl , climb on the counterweight, put the huge starting handle through the side , hang on to the provided grab handle with left hand and wind with the right, get it up to about 50 rpm, press the button to release the decompressors and away it goes .Can't do it now, too aged, but we finally fixed the electric start and that always gets it going, usually without any fires. Not bad for a 75 year old engine that's not had an overhaul since 1959.😀
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9 hours ago, Ian Mac said:
Owning a wooden boat is a stupid thing to do.
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Cheers Ian Mac
How about if someone "owns" three wooden boats? I think of it as more of a very expensive adoption scheme rather than any sense of owning.🙂
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Rochdale Canal onto Ashton Canal ? Wide boats could reach the lower end of Ashton Lock 1 , there was a wide stop lock under the Ducie St bridge, installed so the RCC couldn't get the Ashton's surplus water for nowt. Unfortunately the canal was narrowed here about 20 years ago, for no good reason, so Rochdale size boats can no longer use Whittle's Croft Wharf etc.Note that Store St aqueduct was built wide but maybe reduced width now.
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I think active volcanos should be banned. All that smoke, ash and sulphur can't be healthy. Block them up with a nuclear explosion, that'll fix it.
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Drax power station is a wood burner.
8000 tonnes a day mostly brought from the US of A. Timber is trucked to a processing plant, made into pellets, railed to a port (Galveston?) put in a ship, brought to UK then railed to Drax. As far as I know, all the transport is diesel powered. More CO2 emissions than when it was coal fired and when a major supplying colliery was within sight of said power station. My Squirrel ,plus everybody else's ,won't ever come near those emission levels even if we burn wet wood retrieved from the canal. Yet we need Drax for when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine.
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6 hours ago, dmr said:
Actually maybe it was two weedhatch visits, but it was just the usual plastic bags and tasteless clothing, no Rochdale specials.
link: http://www.fordspecials.co.uk/rochdale.html
Co-incidently, there was a grp bodied Rochdale Special in the derelict Ashton Canal for several years before the canal was re-opened.
It was a white one , at least when it first appeared there.😀
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My guess is they are mooring for a while on the right hand side waiting for a north bound string of boats to come out of the new tunnel. There's a hint of smoke coming out, might that be Bolinder exhaust? Was the battery tug (very on message these days) operational at this period? It's really difficult to get into the new tunnel from a standing start moored on the left.There was a continuous tow path in the tunnel in those days.
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Overnight Mooring for the Etihad Stadium, Manchester.
in General Boating
Posted
If it's just overnight, I would think mooring at the top of lock5 on the towpath outside the tennis venue should be ok. The Ashton Canal , particularly in this area is somewhat gentrified these days, long gone are the vandals,they tend to stay at home fiddling on their "devices". I was going to say the Co-Op venue is but a stone's throw from the suggested mooring😄