Lock 85. Rochdale canal

[frangar]

Looks like some rubbish is jammed under a gate on lock 85 going into Manchester. The notice says might be Monday until it can be fixed…not the greatest place to spend a weekend so just a heads up. 

https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/notices/20321-between-lock-84-and-92-on-the-rochdale-canal

Edited July 31, 2021 by frangar

[matty40s]

Ah, Kebs have the weekend off as well  nowadays....

[frangar]

1 minute ago, matty40s said:

Ah, Kebs have the weekend off as well  nowadays....

Working time directive innit! 
 

I wonder if they think it’s something more serious…and being Manchester that’s probably a dead body! 

[dmr]

If its just something on the cill then they really should fix it now, but if there is nobody stuck on the "9" then its less urgent, anybody coming down can stop in New Islington or go up the Ashton.   If the 9 have wooden floors like the rest of the Rochdale then its starting to look like a lot are getting to the end of their life.

The Rochdale is split into two regions somewhere near the summit and I suspect the Yorkshire team are much more dynamic than those that do the Manchester end.

[David Mack]

When we got stuck on the Rochdale 9 on a Saturday evening a couple of years ago, we rang CRT, got passed around a few people and eventually a chap appeared with a keb and pulled out the carpet that was stuck under the bottom gate and preventing it shutting. There was more rubbish there, but we got a good enough seal to get through. 

I wonder whether the weekend service is now not as good as it was then.

[Pluto]

On 31/07/2021 at 10:00, dmr said:

If its just something on the cill then they really should fix it now, but if there is nobody stuck on the "9" then its less urgent, anybody coming down can stop in New Islington or go up the Ashton.   If the 9 have wooden floors like the rest of the Rochdale then its starting to look like a lot are getting to the end of their life.

The Rochdale is split into two regions somewhere near the summit and I suspect the Yorkshire team are much more dynamic than those that do the Manchester end.

he attached drawing from the Rochdale Canal papers in the GMRO suggests that it was just the lower apron area which was wood. By the time the Rochdale was being built, wood floors were less likely to be used, with just the apron area being made in this way. I have not seen may Rochdale locks empty, but it could be that the earliest could have wooden floors, so that would be those in Yorkshire and the Manchester nine. A similar chronology can be found on the L&LC, where wooden floors can be found in Yorkshire, but stone was used as the canal progressed into Lancashire from the 1790s.

 

Wooden apron covers would be replaced at regular intervals as the effect of water flow through paddles could wear the wood away. That is certainly the case on the locks I know on the L&LC. However, the wooden piles on which the lock sits seem to be original, and have not been replaced. Should they fail, the whole lock would need rebuilding. That said, the Rochdale was built on the cheap, even for a canal, and numerous locks, or locksides, have been replaced over the years. It is a pity that this photo of Tim Bates Lock being rebuilt in 1872 does not show the lock floor, but it does suggest that the intermediate gates, fitted to the Yorkshire locks, had been removed by then.

[Jim Riley]

Planks from the bottom of lock 46, left on the lock side. They may end up as a garden seat. The lock was refloored last summer. Just to demonstrate their incompetence, the broken towpath side top ground paddle was left unrepaired, despite having a coffer dam on site and a crew of workmen. It was fixed s few months later. 

Re the old pic of Tim Bates lock, Sowerby Bridge, I presume it must have been lock 3? Now subsumed into Tuel Deep lock.

[Pluto]

The first photo shows one of the locks at Blackburn during repairs. The apron has a wooden floor, but not the lock, which has a stone invert. The second photo shows one of the Yorkshire locks which does have a wooden floor and no stone invert. The first was built c1810, the second c1777. Wooden floors were used until around 1790, with stone or brick inverts being fairly standard after this. It does mark a major development in lock design, as the stone/brick invert ties the lock walls together far more securely than building individual walls on top of a wooden frame, though neither are completely solid. Quite a few of those locks on the L&LC with wooden floors have had them replaced by concrete, though it would be difficult to ensure that the walls were fully secure against flexing due to subsidence or erosion without major excavation work.

[ditchcrawler]

The locks on the river Blyth in Suffolk are like that

1 minute ago, Pluto said:

. The second photo shows one of the Yorkshire locks which does have a wooden floor and no stone invert. The first was built c1810, the second c1777. Wooden floors were used until around 1790, 

 

 

 

[David Mack]

5 hours ago, Jim Riley said:

Re the old pic of Tim Bates lock, Sowerby Bridge, I presume it must have been lock 3? Now subsumed into Tuel Deep lock.

 

Lock 4 I think, which was more or less where the current Tuel Lane lock is. Lock 3 was where the tunnel is now under Tuel Lane itself. The lower parts of the stone lock walls remain in place and are just visible above the water line in the tunnel. It was much more obvious when we walked through the dry tunnel on an open day shortly before the new lock and tunnel opened.