Jump to content

What??? How???


StephenA

Featured Posts

20 hours ago, roland elsdon said:

Atalanta was banned from the oxford in 1976 I think because the canal had become too small for the boat. When i rebuilt her in 96 she gauged at 7’2 before we pulled her in. She is now on the summit again

7'2" (2.18 mtrs) is wider than the statutory minimum width for the Oxford of 2.13 mtrs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

Minimum or maximum ?

 

The minimum size the canal is maintained to is 2.13 metres.

The maximum sized boat is 2.13 metres

Correct. The 'minimum width for the Oxford' not for the boat. Agreed, I could have phrased it more clearly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7ft 2in is 2,184.4mm

 

2.13m is 54.4mm less. 

 

2.13m is less than 7ft!!

 

2.13m is 6feet, 11 and 18/21sts of an inch.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Mike the Boilerman
Improve accuracy.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There seems to be a steady erosion of width and depth of our narrow canals.  This started with the builders of boats making them 6ft 10 inches instead of Seven Foot.  Give the BWB and CRT an inch and they will take a foot.  Tub Boat canals, here we come.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

24 minutes ago, Chris Williams said:

This started with the builders of boats making them 6ft 10 inches instead of Seven Foot.

 

Wasn't that because new boat buyers totally unreasonably expect their boat to fit through Hurleston, and one successfully sued their boat builder when their 7ft NB didn't? 

 

And hasn't Hurleston been 6ft 11in for decades now? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes our boat was wider than the statutory width for a canal therefore we didnt take her on it. End. A common sense approach that seems to be lost, with oversize boats on both the GU and north oxford canal.

On the other hand our current boat has been through hurleston  in the last 4 years and now cant. That is a different matter, which is annoying.

i suspect Atalanta is canal locked again.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

Wasn't that because new boat buyers totally unreasonably expect their boat to fit through Hurleston, and one successfully sued their boat builder when their 7ft NB didn't? 

 

And hasn't Hurleston been 6ft 11in for decades now? 

BWB should have been sued for not providing a seven foot lock.  Wasn't it Brindley who decided on seven foot, umpteen decades ago.  Damned lock should have been rebuilt.   One lock and everyone has to lose two inches.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Chris Williams said:

BWB should have been sued for not providing a seven foot lock.  Wasn't it Brindley who decided on seven foot, umpteen decades ago.  Damned lock should have been rebuilt.   One lock and everyone has to lose two inches.

 

I'm also fairly sure BW were not allowed to rebuild that lock as it is a scheduled monument, listed building or something ridiculous. Probably took a great deal of effort by BW to achieve that!

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

2.13m is 6feet, 11 and 18/21sts of an inch.

If I was building something to that dimension it would be 7ft. To hell with 3/21sts of an inch. 

  • Happy 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, WotEver said:

If I was building something to that dimension it would be 7ft. To hell with 3/21sts of an inch. 

 

I'm pretty sure the 2.13m started off at 7ft exactly, got converted to metric and rounded off. 

 

The 3/21" was the bit that got lopped off in the rounding!

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

I'm also fairly sure BW were not allowed to rebuild that lock as it is a scheduled monument, listed building or something ridiculous. Probably took a great deal of effort by BW to achieve that!

 

 

If it is listed, scheduled or whatever, it should be put back to how it was built, ie Seven Foot.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

I'm pretty sure the 2.13m started off at 7ft exactly, got converted to metric and rounded off. 

Yeah, they dropped 0.004 metres.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, Chris Williams said:

There seems to be a steady erosion of width and depth of our narrow canals.  This started with the builders of boats making them 6ft 10 inches instead of Seven Foot.  Give the BWB and CRT an inch and they will take a foot.  Tub Boat canals, here we come.

 

I thought it was so that people could cruise with their fenders down and not have to worry too much about getting stuck in locks. :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

40 minutes ago, Boater Sam said:

That's the trouble with the continental metric system, it nicks bits off us every time.

Except in ‘71 when just about everything got rounded up...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Chris Williams said:

BWB should have been sued for not providing a seven foot lock.  Wasn't it Brindley who decided on seven foot, umpteen decades ago.  Damned lock should have been rebuilt.   One lock and everyone has to lose two inches.

The Llangollen (and I presume Hurleston) is listed as 6' 10" in the 1904 edition of Bradshaws guide

Link to comment
Share on other sites

46 minutes ago, jam said:

The Llangollen (and I presume Hurleston) is listed as 6' 10" in the 1904 edition of Bradshaws guide

Be interesting to know where the restriction was, or were all the locks 6'10",  Seems odd when everyone else used seven foot. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, Chris Williams said:

Be interesting to know where the restriction was, or were all the locks 6'10",  Seems odd when everyone else used seven foot. 

I'm away from my Bradshaws at this time but will have a look soon. It is interesting that across the country Bradshaws appears more concise than some current dimensions. It could well be that 7' was just a generic  size.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, jam said:

The Llangollen (and I presume Hurleston) is listed as 6' 10" in the 1904 edition of Bradshaws guide

It's actually 6 foot 9 in Bradshaw 1904

 

8 hours ago, Chris Williams said:

Be interesting to know where the restriction was, or were all the locks 6'10",  Seems odd when everyone else used seven foot. 

 No they didn't, the standard was approximate. Canals were local endeavours built to serve local needs, no one envisaged a boat in London trying to reach Ellesmere. 

 

Measurements were also rather approximate with a lack of precision in construction - what often happened was a canal was built to a notional size and then someone worked out what would actually fit, so the coal canal was built for boats 6 foot 9 by 69 feet but actually took ordinary narrow boats 7 foot by 70

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, magpie patrick said:

no one envisaged a boat in London trying to reach Ellesmere. 

I think James Brindley had a rather more ambitious scheme, joining the Thames to the Severn and Trent, which would require a 'standard' size for boats and locks.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

54 minutes ago, Chris Williams said:

I think James Brindley had a rather more ambitious scheme, joining the Thames to the Severn and Trent, which would require a 'standard' size for boats and locks.

 

He did, but the measurements were imprecise and IIRC (which I may not!) the intention was the boats would be about 6 foot wide and the locks about 7 foot - needless to say the traders of the time pushed the limits, as we do today. (I speak as someone who took a 62 foot narrow boat onto the Huddersfield Brad Canal knowing full well it wouldn't fit through the first lock!)

 

Hurleston Locks were an afterthought, the canal was never supposed to go that way - the Ellesmere Canal Company intended to go across North Wales to Chester and thence to Ellesmere Port. When that fell though they made a hasty plan to cut a canal from the Whitchurch Branch to the Chester Canal and get their trade to Chester that way. The original plan for the canal did not intergrate with the main canal system at all - the only junction with another canal was at Chester, and that was not connected to the system at the time. Nor was it connected when they finally linked up at Hurleston. 

 

(Hurleston Locks opened 1806, Birmingham and Liverpool Junction connecting Chester Canal to S&W 1835, the Middlewich Branch in 1833 - so until 1833 a boat coming from Hurleston couldn't reach another narrow canal) 

 

I think the point I'm making is that, if you were planning the construction of Hurleston locks at the beginning of the 19th century, making sure they were big enough for a Grand Union Town Class wouldn't have been anywhere in your list of priorities...

 

I have no idea why they chose the gauge they did, either for the canal they'd already built up at Ellesmere, or for the link from Whitchurch to Hurleston*, but so long as it could get trade from Ellesmere to Chester then it was fit for purpose, anything else was a bonus. 

 

*Logic would suggest they would choose the same gauge for both, although logic doesn't always come into it!

 

Edited by magpie patrick
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, magpie patrick said:

He did, but the measurements were imprecise and IIRC (which I may not!) the intention was the boats would be about 6 foot wide and the locks about 7 foot - needless to say the traders of the time pushed the limits, as we do today. (I speak as someone who took a 62 foot narrow boat onto the Huddersfield Brad Canal knowing full well it wouldn't fit through the first lock!)

 

Hurleston Locks were an afterthought, the canal was never supposed to go that way - the Ellesmere Canal Company intended to go across North Wales to Chester and thence to Ellesmere Port. When that fell though they made a hasty plan to cut a canal from the Whitchurch Branch to the Chester Canal and get their trade to Chester that way. The original plan for the canal did not intergrate with the main canal system at all - the only junction with another canal was at Chester, and that was not connected to the system at the time. Nor was it connected when they finally linked up at Hurleston. 

 

(Hurleston Locks opened 1806, Birmingham and Liverpool Junction connecting Chester Canal to S&W 1835, the Middlewich Branch in 1833 - so until 1833 a boat coming from Hurleston couldn't reach another narrow canal) 

 

I think the point I'm making is that, if you were planning the construction of Hurleston locks at the beginning of the 19th century, making sure they were big enough for a Grand Union Town Class wouldn't have been anywhere in your list of priorities...

 

I have no idea why they chose the gauge they did, either for the canal they'd already built up at Ellesmere, or for the link from Whitchurch to Hurleston*, but so long as it could get trade from Ellesmere to Chester then it was fit for purpose, anything else was a bonus. 

 

*Logic would suggest they would choose the same gauge for both, although logic doesn't always come into it!

 

Thanks for that, some things I didn't know.  A bit like Brunel and his Broad Gauge railway. (Seven foot and a quarter inch !!).  Never thought people might want to run Standard gauge waggons on it.

I think that an empty Town Class boat, going fast enough, would just ride up and over that lock! 

One of our steerers managed to put one up into a field at Great Heywood.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Back on the original topic, CRT have just sent me a survey by email saying I've been seen out and about on the canal (in my boat) and asking how I think they're doing.

 

I took the opportunity to tell them that shrinking locks as a result of repair work was not acceptable....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 12/05/2019 at 13:37, magpie patrick said:

e big enough for a Grand Union Town Class wouldn't have been anywhere in your list of priorities...

Star class boats especially composite ones are generally even fatter, as they were built specifically  for the GU, and thames. There idea of an integrated network is pretty last century not the one before. If you look in the Gu book they only mention ‘connected waterways’ not a huge network really.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.