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Croydon canal


Bill P

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I'm back on the forums, and hoping to update my profile later today or over the coming days and weeks to allow for having had major surgery for a life-threatening condition on Wednesday 8th January 2020, and being not sure yet when I'll be out boating again, it could be a few months from now.

 

Long live the Croydon Canal song! I have a friend who says he's got a recording of it., and hope to hear that sometime this month and be back to say a bit about it!

 

Peter X

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1 hour ago, Peter X said:

I'm back on the forums, and hoping to update my profile later today or over the coming days and weeks to allow for having had major surgery for a life-threatening condition on Wednesday 8th January 2020, and being not sure yet when I'll be out boating again, it could be a few months from now.

 

Long live the Croydon Canal song! I have a friend who says he's got a recording of it., and hope to hear that sometime this month and be back to say a bit about it!

 

Peter X

 

 

All the best with recovery PeterX.

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On 20/12/2019 at 13:52, Heartland said:

St Colomb Canal, Act 1773, out of use 1781

You can still find some of this one on the ground including the incline at Lusty Glaze.

 

 

20190714_200515.jpg

 

Lusty Glaze incline taken last July when I was there for a wedding, there is a council sign about it at the top of the cliff.

Edited by buccaneer66
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1 hour ago, buccaneer66 said:

You can still find some of this one on the ground including the incline at Lusty Glaze.

 

spacer.png

 

Lusty Glaze incline taken last July when I was there for a wedding, there is a council sign about it at the top of the cliff.

 

I don't see the picture, just a grey No Entry sign.

Edited by David Mack
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I saw the remains of the St Columb Canal about 25 years ago - it would justify a return visit I think. It's one of those curious footnotes of canal history, real "edge of the kingdom stuff". As a concept it was completely bonkers (unlike the Croydon Canal!) - a tub boat canal with a semi-circular route, both ends being above the cliffs at Newquay - why not one canal, or two separate ones (which is what was actually built) and, above all, just.... why???? 

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49 minutes ago, magpie patrick said:

I saw the remains of the St Columb Canal about 25 years ago - it would justify a return visit I think. It's one of those curious footnotes of canal history, real "edge of the kingdom stuff". As a concept it was completely bonkers (unlike the Croydon Canal!) - a tub boat canal with a semi-circular route, both ends being above the cliffs at Newquay - why not one canal, or two separate ones (which is what was actually built) and, above all, just.... why???? 

There were certainly some bonkers ideas for canals, i have a plan of the croydon canal somewhere i'll have to dig it out.

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  • 2 weeks later...

(oops!)

...Various locks to get up from the Thames to its summit pound along the south side of Sydenham Hill, a reservoir or two to feed that (South Norwood Lake, near the top of the hill), and some locks down into Croydon. Plus some 15(?) miles of canal digging, and the basin at the end near the centre of Croydon.

I'm not sure over its 27 years or so whether the investors got their money back, but maybe when the railway company came in with an offer in 1836 or so, they found it tempting. And I suppose the railway investors would have done well out of it. That was before the railway mania of the 1840s crashed the market.

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Sutcliffe, in his 1816 book on Canals and Reservoirs did not consider him competent, and some of his decisions on his earlier canals, particularly the Rochdale, are certainly dubious. He was probably influenced by his time with Boulton and Watt, relying too heavily on steam-powered pumping. On his early projects, he did not have a good eye for water supplies, with such virtually-impossible canals as the Rochdale branch from Todmorden to Lothersdale being proposed. His later work was much better.

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23 hours ago, Heartland said:

I see John Rennie was associated with the Croydon Canal, which puts a competent engineer in charge of the project

I think Rennie was a fine Architect and whatever qualification is needed to build lighthouses

 

19 hours ago, Pluto said:

Sutcliffe, in his 1816 book on Canals and Reservoirs did not consider him competent, and some of his decisions on his earlier canals, particularly the Rochdale, are certainly dubious. He was probably influenced by his time with Boulton and Watt, relying too heavily on steam-powered pumping. On his early projects, he did not have a good eye for water supplies, with such virtually-impossible canals as the Rochdale branch from Todmorden to Lothersdale being proposed. His later work was much better.

 

Although neither the K&A nor the Somerset Coal Canal are as high as the northern canals, the water runs out at a much lower altitude, so he hit the same problem here. Although these canals "worked" with their pumped supply they never carried the tonnage of the northern waterways, and in the case of the Coal Canal, it was William Smith who had to sort the practical issues of delivery. Pumping, it transpired, was a better option than the caisson lock!

 

That said I think the K&A wisely went for pumping rather than the original four mile long tunnel that would have avoided the need for it.

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5 hours ago, magpie patrick said:

That said I think the K&A wisely went for pumping rather than the original four mile long tunnel that would have avoided the need for it.

Although tunnels were expensive to build, they did have other advantages. Leakage of ground water into Foulridge Tunnel was calculated to provide around 10 lock fulls per day, probably enough for boats carrying 70,000 tons annually, so not insignificant. The canal was carrying over 250,000 tons annually when the tunnel opened, though half of that was coal from Wigan to Liverpool.

 

As our canals were mostly privately financed, they had to be built on the cheap. This was particularly so for Canal Mania canals, where pumping was used to keep costs down in the forlorn hope that traffic would pay for pumping costs later. Pumping was a reasonable solution for the BCN, where the height of the main line relative to the overall height of the surrounding land made reservoirs more difficult because of restricted gathering grounds. Pumping from mines would have been beneficial as well.

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3 hours ago, Pluto said:

Although tunnels were expensive to build, they did have other advantages. Leakage of ground water into Foulridge Tunnel was calculated to provide around 10 lock fulls per day, probably enough for boats carrying 70,000 tons annually, so not insignificant.

That's an interesting thought - Foulridge is a much "drier" tunnel since they stabilised it with concrete, so I wonder if (some of) the groundwater is going elsewhere now.

 

Admittedly a bit less water is better than a collapsed tunnel!

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On 06/02/2020 at 11:50, Pluto said:

Although tunnels were expensive to build, they did have other advantages. Leakage of ground water into Foulridge Tunnel was calculated to provide around 10 lock fulls per day, probably enough for boats carrying 70,000 tons annually, so not insignificant. The canal was carrying over 250,000 tons annually when the tunnel opened, though half of that was coal from Wigan to Liverpool.

 

As our canals were mostly privately financed, they had to be built on the cheap. This was particularly so for Canal Mania canals, where pumping was used to keep costs down in the forlorn hope that traffic would pay for pumping costs later. Pumping was a reasonable solution for the BCN, where the height of the main line relative to the overall height of the surrounding land made reservoirs more difficult because of restricted gathering grounds. Pumping from mines would have been beneficial as well.

Tunnels also presented a significant long term maintenance issue - wheras Combe Hay is the longest lock-flight that is out of use (and the only one in the top-ten I think) the longer tunnels tend to on derelict waterways and indeed their collapse often contributed to the demise of the canal in question.

 

The Coal canal is an odd one, the Summit is only about 300 feet above sea level and couldn't be any lower as the terminal basins are on the valley floor, it isn't a watershed canal. It was also, by the standards of the area, pretty succesful. However the point about dependency on pumping is a good one - the death knell came when Timsbury Colliery refused to provide coal for the pumps as they weren't being paid, and it was only the wet winter of 1898/99 that allowed it a final six months before becoming unuseable 

 

Edited after @Tim Lewis spotted my time travel tendency

Edited by magpie patrick
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17 hours ago, magpie patrick said:

Tunnels also presented a significant long term maintenance issue - wheras Combe Hay is the longest lock-flight that is out of use (and the only one in the top-ten I think) the longer tunnels tend to on derelict waterways and indeed their collapse often contributed to the demise of the canal in question.

 

The Coal canal is an odd one, the Summit is only about 300 feet above sea level and couldn't be any lower as the terminal basins are on the valley floor, it isn't a watershed canal. It was also, by the standards of the area, pretty succesful. However the point about dependency on pumping is a good one - the death knell came when Timsbury Colliery refused to provide coal for the pumps as they weren't being paid, and it was only the wet winter of 1998/99 that allowed it a final six months before becoming unuseable 

A fairly recent abandonment then ?

 

 

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I think the Croydon Canal was abandoned in 1836 by the railway company who'd bought it in order to use much of its land, for what is now called the "Overground" railway from West Croydon via Forest Hill to New Cross and beyond. Therefore not a "recent abandonment".

A short section of the Croydon Canal, later lined with concrete not clay, still exists in Betts Park, Anerley, which someone could in theory float along in a rubber dinghy, something I'd like to see done. So I suppose it could be argued that it's not totally abandoned? It depends how you define that maybe?

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