Pluto

Kennet will be at the World Heritage Day event at Saltaire today (Saturday) 11am-4pm and over the Mayday weekend for the Saltaire Arts Trail. There will be a large selection of second-hand canal books for sale, as well as the usual displays. (Money raised will go to this autumn's major docking) We do seem to have plenty of volunteers for these events, but could always do with more!

1963 or 1964, and a young Paul Lorenz waits for a level so he can take Anker out of Watford Locks.

There are some on the L&LC, the photo being of Anchor Lock, Gargrave. I suspect they were all installed in the 1820s or 1830s, as one lock at Barrowford does have a date stone in the chamber wall. They could have been seen as an improvement on vertical paddles, but were more expensive to maintain.

Sloping paddles are illustrated in Maillard's book on canal building. His designs were based on visiting English canals in 1795. Sloping the paddles could ensure that the seal will be better over time as the paddle will not leave the wooden runners and so less likely for rubbish to interfere with the seal.

Joanna photographed in 1963 by Geoff Wheat whilst descending Farmers Bridge Locks.

I did come across this gentleman using a horse for removing timber from a forest in Slovakia. On nose-tins, a L&LC boatman told me they used them at locks as eating gave the horse something to do while the boat was in the lock.

Returning to stern wheelers, they were used on the Oder, the pre-war ones being German-built. After the war, the Dutch built small and large tugs to help Poland recover. The small one pictured here is now preserved at Wroclaw. The photos were taken by the controller of the river traffic post-war, and he had a good eye for a picture, with a number of the families on the towed barges.

Yeoford and Pictor descending Wolverhampton locks in 1970.

Lauserne was to be one terminus of Canal d'Entrerouches, the other being at Yverdon. The construction of the canal began in 1638, and by 1648 it had reached Cossonay, where a basin was built with the wharf house seen below, with the canal route identified by the road. The canal did operate fairly successfully by carrying wine and salt, though never in large quantities, and it was abandoned in 1829.

A narrow canal a long way from home.

Back in 1964, before being interested in canals, I volunteered on the Welshpool & Llanfair Rly, and we were invited to the re-naming of two locos on the Zillertal Rly. On the way, we visited the Chiemsee, where the way from the railways station to the quay was by a narrow-gauge railway. Here are photos of the railway, and the paddle-steamer Ludwig Fessel. I revisited in 2019, and the Ludwig Fessler was still in operation, as was the railway.

They were in operation on Czech waterways until about twenty-five years ago. One is preserved in the Berlin Harbour Museum, but it proved a little difficult to photograph, so this is the stern in 1996. You can just make out that there is a port and starboard wheel cover, so steering could have been by varying wheel rotation or speed. There is a rudder as well. The second photo shows one working on the Elbe at Dresden, photo from https://www.der-lustige-modellbauer.com/t29821-heckrad-dampfer-friedrich-der-bn-alles-unbekannt

An interesting article on the BP tanker barges operating on the Danube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Tanker_Company

From the passenger steamers, Goethe still survived in service until recently. There are at least two steam paddle tugs, The Oskar Huber at Ruhrort, and the Danube tug Ruthof/Érsekcsanád at Regensburg. I did see the sailing barge natch on the Muggelss, near Berlin, in 1997, but this seems no longer to take place.

You have to get use to the larger barges in Easter Europe, which usually had a covered steering location, which looked a little like a motor boat. They are quite difficult to photograph from the bank or boat. The first picture is of a tow of four barges passing Budapest, the second of a single tug and barge in the comparatively new lock at Gabcikovo. I suspect you could almost get a narrowboat in sideways.