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Battery Towing Tractors. A Cunning Plan to Replace Diesel Boat Engines


Jen-in-Wellies

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4 minutes ago, magpie patrick said:

That is surely the comic version of the Cheval Electrique? A kind of French Ivor the Engine? 

 

14 minutes ago, Pluto said:

The French had it sorted in 1900; either use three women or an electric tractor.

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1900 Voies_navigables_du_Nord_et_[...]Le_Quintrec_btv1b12000412.jpg

You wouldn't want to drop in the cut with that when connected to the over heads 

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1 minute ago, Rob-M said:

Perhaps all the towpath resurfacing is in preparation for running tractors and nothing to do with cycling superhighways.

Do you think CaRT. , has a cunning plan ,,,lol,

How about we use the cyclists to pull the boats !!! 

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Many aspects make this non-viable. How would the number of tractors be matched to the number of boats? Might a boat be stranded until a tractor becomes available? What about stretches of the Thames where the path is a mile or more inland and both banks are in private ownership? How would someone single-hand with a tractor?

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15 minutes ago, Mike on the Wey said:

Many aspects make this non-viable. How would the number of tractors be matched to the number of boats? Might a boat be stranded until a tractor becomes available? What about stretches of the Thames where the path is a mile or more inland and both banks are in private ownership? How would someone single-hand with a tractor?

They'd bring back the DUKW (runs on petrol so stays within the brief of not being diesel)

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19 hours ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

Already covered in the first post. Basically going back to the old way of doing it, but with a mechanical horse. Fancy legging Standedge tunnel?

 

When I say tractor, I don't mean

563px-Modern-tractor.jpg.34d77d2cbc3abdecf7b23b824419e356.jpg

I mean something closer to the towing tractors that have been used on towpaths in the past, but even smaller, as they wouldn't have the weight of a loaded working boat to pull.

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Most towpaths are wide enough to pass. Where they aren't, then that would be an area requiring upgrade. You couldn't pass in a bridge hole, but you couldn't with horses either. Of course a mechanical horse is always possible. Here is a very early thing from ten years ago. Petrol powered. Youtube embedding doesn't seem to be working.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc

 

@peterboat can. They are big. The thing is that a lot of energy is wasted turning a propeller to get forward motion through the water. In deep open water, you have no choice. On land, something on the towpath pulling a boat can do it with very little energy in comparison. A typical human can produce up to 200W of effort on say a bike. Less needed to keep a boat going at 3mph. 1 horse power is 743W, and that is the maximum needed to get things started. A towpath towing gadget would need a much smaller battery pack. It wouldn't require a crane to winch the batteries in and out of the boat as it could just wheel itself in to a charging point and you can attach a charged one to the tow rope and be on your way in minutes.

 

Jen

 

 

 

 

Perhaps tow lines could double up as charging cables. 

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Nice little electric loco as used for towing barges on the canal entre Marne et Rhin. Most of the track and overhead wiring are still present in the souterrain de Mauvages, and intermittently elsewhere. As far as I can see it was a single track system, so when two locos came nose-to-nose preseumably the two lines were swapped and the locos reversed away. I believe they were about 10 kW or so. There are a few of the locos still to be seen along the canal.

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Some time around the middle of the 19th C the waterways experimented with using a small steam loco to haul boats on the Middlewich Branch of the Shropshire Union.

 

The loco, an 0-4-0, was borrowed from the Crewe works where it was used to move stuff around the site.

 

It wasn't a success and was soon abandoned.

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33 minutes ago, Jim Riley said:

The OP stated the tractors were to be limited to 3mph. Speed limit is 4mph. Some of us like to make progress at times, so a range of tractors please. 

3mph isn't a limit, just the typical speed as an example. I doubt you'd be doing 4mph on some of the shallower ditches. You can have a faster tractor if you like. Jen-in-Wellies says it is OK ?. If you get a souped up one you can try to use the soliton wave effect, like the old packet boats and travel at 10mph. Not sure what CaRT would have to say about it though. You can even have a cavalry sabre on the bow of your boat to cut the tow ropes of anyone who gets in your way!

 

Jen

 

https://www.canalworld.net/forums/index.php?/topic/100000-how-fast-did-flyboats-go/&do=findComment&comment=2260720

 

 

Edited by Jen-in-Wellies
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On 13/08/2019 at 21:09, Mike on the Wey said:

Many aspects make this non-viable. How would the number of tractors be matched to the number of boats? Might a boat be stranded until a tractor becomes available? What about stretches of the Thames where the path is a mile or more inland and both banks are in private ownership? How would someone single-hand with a tractor?

Each boat has a tractor. The tractor stays with the boat. You only swap it for a charged one when it is about to go flat. If you have extra solar capacity on your boat, you could use it to charge the tractor. yourself There needs to be enough spare charged ones at each charging station to cope with the demand. On a canal with locks, there is a maximum number of boats that can pass each day. The advantage of tractors is that if boats are stuck in queues for the locks, then they aren't moving and the tractors aren't losing charge, so you have a limit to the demand. The number of spare tractors will required will depend on the charge time and the canal capacity. At some point, you could end up with a flat tractor and no spare available, as you can run in to a huge long queue at a lock and not move for ages under the current system.

 

The Thames is not the only major river where the lack of tow path is a problem. It is also EA, not CaRT. Various solutions are possible as previously described, including tugs. The Chesterfield Canal narrowboats even had sails for the tiidal Trent!

 

Jen

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On 13/08/2019 at 20:46, Rob-M said:

Perhaps all the towpath resurfacing is in preparation for running tractors and nothing to do with cycling superhighways.

 

On 13/08/2019 at 20:48, Spanners said:

Do you think CaRT. , has a cunning plan ,,,lol,

How about we use the cyclists to pull the boats !!! 

If you look at old pictures from the days when tow paths were used for towing, you'll see that the path was wide, smooth and surfaced with gravel/ash. The modern cycle track upgrade, as long as it is graded, not tarmac, is much closer to the proper condition than the muddy winding and narrow track through grass we think of as being normal. Have a look at this postcard from 1910 as an example. You can see plenty of space for my tractors on that towpath, with no vegetation on the edge to get in the way of the ropes.

 

Jen

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2 hours ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

Each boat has a tractor. The tractor stays with the boat. You only swap it for a charged one when it is about to go flat.

 

Jen

Why not the boat own the tractor and have battery packs which can be swapped?  That would need less storage space at the change over points, you could also have a spare battery to give you greater range if change over points were busy etc.

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9 hours ago, Jerra said:

Why not the boat own the tractor and have battery packs which can be swapped?  That would need less storage space at the change over points, you could also have a spare battery to give you greater range if change over points were busy etc.

That would work too and may be a better approach. It would also give owners the chance to have their tractor customised to go with its boat. Twenty years from now, you might have tourist guides to England enthusing about watching the gaily painted traditional tractors pulling  boats on the canals, but not mentioning the rusty "shed" tractors sitting in the weeds alongside their shed boats!

 

Having batteries that could be swapped out at charging points used to be an idea for electric cars, but seems to have died a death in favour of built in batteries. Lack of standardisation is a problem there, with several versions of car charging plugs even. An organisation like CaRT can impose a standard format for inland boats, due to their size. Swapping batteries, rather than entire tractors would reduce the space required for charge/swap stations.

 

As far as battery capacity required, I tried doing a few quick calculations. Some of the assumptions here are untested, so they are little better than an order of magnitude go.

When I've bow hauled boats, once it is moving, it takes a relatively low force to keep it going. Say around 20Kg(f), or around 200N

The energy needed to move that boat is force x distance, so to move a boat at 4.8km/hr (3mph) would be 48,000 * 200, or 960,000J/hr.

One hour is 3600 seconds, and watts are joules/sec, so the power needed to move the boat at 3mph is 960,000/3,600 = 267W. This is similar to the 200W motors that are fitted to electric bikes, or the around 250W that a fit human can put out and around 1/3rd of a horsepower (743W). You would want a one horsepower motor in your tractor to cope with losses, getting boats moving and climbing bridges.

 

Let us say, that our tractor is consuming 400W over an eight hour boating day. This comes to 3.2kWhr of power that will need to be replaced in the batteries. A typical e-bike battery is around 0.25 to 0.5kWhr in capacity, so we are looking at a battery between seven and fourteen times the size, so the weight is not inconsiderable. Fortunately, your tractor is already on wheels to help move it to around, so should minimise the manual handling required, or the batteries could be subdivided in to smaller units for handling.

 

Jen

Edited by Jen-in-Wellies
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58 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

In all honesty, bringing back horses would be more practical than this idea.  And trained crocodiles for when you go onto rivers.

What is impractical about this? Crocodiles are definitely the way to go for river towing though.

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2 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

Compared to horses?  There's a lot more horse fuel lying around the network than electric tractor fuel.

 

Since electric tractor fuel will have to come from renewable resources, there is plenty of that blowing in the wind and shining in the sky too. Fuel for crocodiles is easier. Cows coming down to the river to drink, people going swimming.

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22 minutes ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

Since electric tractor fuel will have to come from renewable resources, there is plenty of that blowing in the wind and shining in the sky too. Fuel for crocodiles is easier. Cows coming down to the river to drink, people going swimming.

I don't get it.  If you're saying the tractor will change up from hook up points powered by wind and solar, why not just plug the boats into those points and cut out the middle person.

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49 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

I don't get it.  If you're saying the tractor will change up from hook up points powered by wind and solar, why not just plug the boats into those points and cut out the middle person.

Because tractors are small. Think mobility scooter size. Boats are huge. If you charge electric boats from mains hook ups, you need hook up points wherever electric boats moor, which means high power electric cables and bollards all over the system, including out of the way moorings in the sticks, or boats fighting to get at limited charging capability. A huge expense to install and maintain. Tractors also use much less power to tow a boat than an electric boat needs to turn a propeller. Wheels on a towpath are just much more efficient at getting forward motion than a propeller whirling around in the water, so much smaller batteries are required, which means fewer charging points and lower times to charge them up again, or swap them out for charged ones. If a tractor carries enough charge for a days boating, then exchange stations, whether to exchange an entire tractor, or just the batteries, would only need to be about as frequent as sanitation stations are now. The busier the canal, then the bigger and more frequent the stations would need to be. It is all about the amount of power required and where that comes from, as well as making use of the towpath in a way that has disappeared with the horses. Just as a comparison. @peterboat's wide beam uses around 3000W of power to travel at 3mph. Around eight to ten times what I'm estimating a tractor drawn narrowboat will need. See

 

Horses are incredibly inefficient, nice creatures that they are. It takes a lot of feed all year round, from an immense area of land to feed a horse. It needs shelter, mucking out, vets and general looking after all the time, if it is towing boats, or not. It is why they were replaced by machines as soon as machines became practical. In general, that was boats with on board diesel engines and propellers in most cases, as they needed a smaller crew for the boat. The extra power to cope with the inefficiency of the propeller wasn't a problem as it was easily available by burning more oil in a bigger engine. Getting rid of fossil fuels means that energy efficiency becomes more critical, so thinking through how boats are moved is a good idea. Going back to the old horse way, where people had to work out how to use the limited power available (One Horse Power, literally!), helps, but use today's technology, electric motors, LiPo batteries, etc.

 

Jen

 

Jen

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Interesting reading. First, getting ANY government to build inferstructure is difficult. And if it doesn't generate income its even a bigger problem . 

 There were a lot of ideas in this post, all would require large investments. And a new set of problems , someone always on the tractors, passing boats, charging points, the list goes on. It would seem that it would just be cheaper in the long run to install better systems on each boat. 

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9 minutes ago, jeff thompson said:

Interesting reading. First, getting ANY government to build inferstructure is difficult. And if it doesn't generate income its even a bigger problem . 

 There were a lot of ideas in this post, all would require large investments. And a new set of problems , someone always on the tractors, passing boats, charging points, the list goes on. It would seem that it would just be cheaper in the long run to install better systems on each boat. 

Money is always the problem. It is why CaRT's maintenance backlog keeps getting longer. This is something that would need a trial to test it and iron out any problems, or find the show stoppers. At some point. Soon if we are sensible, later, if we are not, we have to almost stop burning oil and gas. The waterways are not going to be exempt from that.

 

Any expansion on what the better systems on each boat might be and how they'd work?

 

Jen

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Jen, another good question. I have to think it would have to have something to do with batteries. So far, we still have the sun . Solar is getting better all the time, Lithium batteries are getting a good amount of praise , be it they are pricey , but seem to be coming down in cost. would larger battery banks , more solar panels work? I don't know, but it seems to me, thats a good place to start. Safe boating to all.

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3 minutes ago, jeff thompson said:

Jen, another good question. I have to think it would have to have something to do with batteries. So far, we still have the sun . Solar is getting better all the time, Lithium batteries are getting a good amount of praise , be it they are pricey , but seem to be coming down in cost. would larger battery banks , more solar panels work? I don't know, but it seems to me, thats a good place to start. Safe boating to all.

Hi Jeff,

See @peterboat. He  has beaten you to it. Have a read of his thread in my post above. The entire roof of his wide beam is covered in solar panels to charge the lithium batteries. He has been out cruising in it successfully in summer, but winter will restrict its range considerably. One of the aims of my proposal is to keep all year round, long distance canal cruising a practical thing in a post oil world.

 

Jen

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