Transhipment on inland navigation

[Heartland]

A facet of moving merchandise or minerals by boat was the element of transhipment. This is quite a complicated subject to consider, but was an accepted practice on the waterways. Everything in the hold of the vessel needed loading and unloading and there were places where items were transferred between vessels such as at the inland ports or at river locations. Take the movement of pottery clay to North Staffordshire. That traffic was moved to the port in Cornwall or Devon to be placed in the hold of a coastal vessel. It might travel to the Mersey for transhipment into a flat and then again at Preston Brook into a narrow boat. Coal was regularly transhipped on several occasions. Take the coal from South Staffordshire to Cheltenham. Such coal could be moved to Stourport by narrowboat and then trow to Gloucester and then find itself in a tramroad waggon to the coal yards near the Knapp Toll Gate at Cheltenham. For merchandise imagine a journey for engine parts from Boulton & Watts Soho Foundry to the Caledonian Canal in Scotland which could mean transport by narrow boat to Shardlow, Trent Boat to Gainsborough and coastal vessel to Scotland. The practice of transhipment could often involve the physical manual labour of the boatmen and wharf staff and there was also the crane for the merchandise.

 

This is said in the context of later railway transport, where transhipment was equally common at goods depots. But the enforced transhipment at a break of gauge is something that became a contetious issue and something that parliament chose to limit. Yet transhipment had increased now that railways were part of the mix particulrly at waterway and railway interchange points.

 

The number of staff needed for transhipment duties and the recording of the transfers must have made up a formidable workforce if considered in total

[magpie patrick]

Two comments

 

In many cases the first transhipment, certainly for coal, was from the colliery tramroad that led to the canal - the Somersetshire Coal Canal act gave powers to create roads and tramroads recognising the collieries were not canal side. I am unsure whether the coal would already have been transhipped at the pit head having come out in yet another, smaller wagon. 

 

The second is that coal was easily damaged in transhipment as the market then seems to have favoured gert lumps of the stuff (well, they'd be "gert" on the coal canal, probably "big" everywhere else) and repeated loading and unloading could break it up

[Pluto]

25 minutes ago, magpie patrick said:

The second is that coal was easily damaged in transhipment as the market then seems to have favoured gert lumps of the stuff (well, they'd be "gert" on the coal canal, probably "big" everywhere else) and repeated loading and unloading could break it up

The reduction in breakage was a major factor in the development of the compartment boats on the A&CN in the 1860s. Later, when the Dortmund-Ems Canal was being designed at the end of the 19th century, the designers calculated the difference in height coal would be dropped during transfer from the colliery to a seagoing ship in port by different forms of both rail and water transport. Several types of compartment boat were considered, though conventional 1000 ton capacity barges were eventually chosen. There are many different types of coal, and it was end use which dictated how careful handling had to be with, for example, household coal attracting a premium if it was in large lumps.

 

For general merchandise, keeping the cargo dry became more important after railway competition developed, though the cotton and grain traffics did sometimes have undercover transhipping prior to this.

[1st ade]

41 minutes ago, magpie patrick said:

as the market then seems to have favoured gert lumps of the stuff

When powering steam locomotives, "small coal" could be swept by the fire draught straight up the chimney!

[Heartland]

Along the banks of the BCN, there were many types of transhipment, apart from coal. The iron industry once had a remarkable set of stages where pig iron was moved by boat for foundry or forge. At the forge the iron was worked up as wrought iron and the products sguch as bars, sheet or rods might be sent onto other firm where the rods became wire, and the sheets worked up for structural ironwork. Derick cranes were often part of the wharf equipment dotted around the canal banks. 

[Ray T]

I'll have to consult "At the Heart of the Waterways" by David Blagrove but I believe Braunston was a trans shipment point between the A45 Turnpike and the Grand Junction Canal at one time.

 

[Heartland]

The transhipment at Braunston was with the Oxford Canal which used to pass onto to Wolfhamcote before the shortening of the Oxford Canal route