Late era Narrowboats
Discussion
Found out the other day (if I've read it correctly) that cargo narrow boats were still being built into the 50/s and early 60's. Why would anyone transport goods by barge when railway and lorry transport was so well established, and presumably cheaper and quicker? And what goods would have likely been carried?
Condi said:
Found out the other day (if I've read it correctly) that cargo narrow boats were still being built into the 50/s and early 60's. Why would anyone transport goods by barge when railway and lorry transport was so well established, and presumably cheaper and quicker? And what goods would have likely been carried?
Industrial inertia. The canals had been transporting cargo from before the railways were here (let alone modern roads) and there were plenty of towns and industries built up alongside the canals but with indirect rail links because they were in the centre of town on the canal/river wharfs while the railway ran around the edge (or what had been the edge when it was built). In some ways the canal system offered a much better 'door to door' service than the railways - there was a wharf or dock in nearly every significant town and, unlike a railway, you didn't neccessarily need to build a siding and a station or depot wherever you wanted to load/unload cargo. If you had, say, a large building site within striking distance of a canal you could just tie your barges up at the bank carrying bricks or other materials and unload them there with very little in the way of extra infrastructure. Also until well into the 1970s (and the widespread growth of lorry-carrying Ro-Ro ferries and our entry into the EEC) a lot of trade, especially certain raw materials, came either from overseas to British ports or was nationally distributed by the coastal shipping trade. Since coasters tended to trade between ports on river estuaries/mouths, most of these ports were also served by navigable rivers heading inland and then to the canal network, so it made a certain amount of sense to keep the cargo water-bourne. For instance, giant rolls of paper were carried by coaster to Hull and taken up the Humber and then along the Trent to Nottingham by barge where it was transhipped to road for final distribution to various printworks in the Midlands. This traffic wasn't worked by narrowboats like you see on the modern canals - they were modern motorised versions of the traditional Humber Keel, about 60 feet long and 20 feet wide, more like the river barges you see in Europe. But the traditional narrowboats still carried cargo for much the same reasons. Although slow, canal transport was relatively cheap (or, more accurately, cost-efficient) so it was still a perfectly viable, if not exactly optimal, choice for shifting low-value bulky cargo.
What did for the last of the traffic was the winter of 1963 when much of the canal network froze up and was impassable. That forced commercial users to look for other means to shift their cargoes, most opted for the roads and virtually all of them never went back to the canals once they had made that switch. Rather like how the 1955 ASLEF strike suddenly and irreparably damaged the railways' freight business. From that point on the road network improved while the canals were neglected, lorries became bigger and faster and Victorian infrastructure, industries and towns were redesigned or replaced to accept large-scale road transport. The coastal shipping trade went into a similar decline for similar reasons. Once your freight was coming into the country by lorry it made no sense to unload it onto a barge, ship it at 5mph across the country and transfer it back onto a different lorry for the last few miles of its journey. You also had the advent of containerisation which meant that it became much easier to transfer cargo from ship to road. Meanwhile the nation replaced coal as its source of industrial power with oil and gas - coal had to be shipped in bulk to wherever it was needed, which was another traffic which kept many of the canals open (if not exactly profitable) but oil and gas could be moved by pipeline.
Edited by 2xChevrons on Friday 29th March 17:05
A bit more digging suggests that on larger canals there is investment going back in, with the Canal and River trust even putting in planning earlier this year for a new inland port near Leeds.
https://www.canalboat.co.uk/news/a-future-for-frei...
https://southleedslife.com/new%E2%80%88port-to-be-...
And here are some old videos of cargo being carried along the network.
https://www.canalboat.co.uk/canal-boats/10-nostalg...
https://www.canalboat.co.uk/news/a-future-for-frei...
https://southleedslife.com/new%E2%80%88port-to-be-...
And here are some old videos of cargo being carried along the network.
https://www.canalboat.co.uk/canal-boats/10-nostalg...
Chrisgr31 said:
What an interesting post
Indeed. I would consider myself reasonably informed, but still found it a well written informative post which well surpassed what I was going to write on the topic!You also have to remember, in the 50s-60s lorries and roads where still quite a way from where we are now.
Daniel
Edited by dhutch on Friday 29th March 21:38
Whilst clearly Narrowboats were never going to be efficient enough to survive any longer than they did, inland waterways generally should have done much better in the UK than they did, or are doing.
You only have to look at the enormous amount of freight traffic on some of Europe’s waterway network to see how the UK has missed out.
OK our rivers don’t tend to be as suitable, but the main reasons are that our Industry grew up and continues to be centred away from the principle waterways, built around the early Canals and the Railways, then Subsequently the Roads.
The UK government has never put the cash into our waterways to make them viable, even in places where they clearly could have been.
You only have to look at the enormous amount of freight traffic on some of Europe’s waterway network to see how the UK has missed out.
OK our rivers don’t tend to be as suitable, but the main reasons are that our Industry grew up and continues to be centred away from the principle waterways, built around the early Canals and the Railways, then Subsequently the Roads.
The UK government has never put the cash into our waterways to make them viable, even in places where they clearly could have been.
velocemitch said:
Whilst clearly Narrowboats were never going to be efficient enough to survive any longer than they did, inland waterways generally should have done much better in the UK than they did, or are doing.
You only have to look at the enormous amount of freight traffic on some of Europe’s waterway network to see how the UK has missed out.
OK our rivers don’t tend to be as suitable, but the main reasons are that our Industry grew up and continues to be centred away from the principle waterways, built around the early Canals and the Railways, then Subsequently the Roads.
The UK government has never put the cash into our waterways to make them viable, even in places where they clearly could have been.
There are big differences between things in Europe and here though. You only have to look at the enormous amount of freight traffic on some of Europe’s waterway network to see how the UK has missed out.
OK our rivers don’t tend to be as suitable, but the main reasons are that our Industry grew up and continues to be centred away from the principle waterways, built around the early Canals and the Railways, then Subsequently the Roads.
The UK government has never put the cash into our waterways to make them viable, even in places where they clearly could have been.
The major waterways in Europe are not only long longer and wider - allowing larger vessels to navigate them - but also run for much longer distances. The Rhine is navigable for over 500 miles, and sea going, or coastal vessels can sail direct from the UK to deep into Germany without the need to trans-ship at Antwerp. In the UK, not only are we at most 70 miles from the coast, but our rivers and canals are nowhere near as suitable for coastal vessels, and so anything arriving to port needs trans-shipping into a smaller vessel.
Businesses will always use the most cost efficient form of transport available to them, I'm not sure that government investment on its own is necessarily going to change how much the waterways are used.
Yes I agree, but we do have some big rivers, the Severn, the Trent, the Weaver, all have sea going traffic up to a point, we just never built big towns on them in the areas where we could have taken advantage of them. We built them by then Railways instead.
We live with this legacy now, but hardly realise.
We live with this legacy now, but hardly realise.
velocemitch said:
Yes I agree, but we do have some big rivers, the Severn, the Trent, the Weaver, all have sea going traffic up to a point, we just never built big towns on them in the areas where we could have taken advantage of them. We built them by then Railways instead.
We live with this legacy now, but hardly realise.
Most of the industrial cities were built on canals rather than railways - virtually every major trunk railway has a canal running alongside it, and the railways mostly just provided more efficient transport for traffic that already existed on the canals. We're not like America - very few of our towns/cities sprang up from the railway alone (and of those that did most were dedicated 'railway towns' like Crewe or Swindon, or were commuter residential rather than industrial). We live with this legacy now, but hardly realise.
Before the railway era there were plenty of towns that counted as 'big' by the standards of their day which were based on river transport - Lincoln, Boston, Wisbech, King's Lynn, Peterborough, Newark, Selby, Gloucester, Leeds and so on all had significant (or even major) waterbourne trade in the medieval or early modern era. But they went in to decline either because of shifting economic patterns, lack of maintenance (especially after the plague years and the civil war), falling water levels, inland drainage (most of the inland ports in East Anglia became literal backwaters when the Fens were drained and they ended up 20+ miles inland and without regular in-flows of water) or the development of artificial canals, and those that survived were in constant competition with the railways even if a surprising amount of traffic remained on the waterways until fairly recently.
Just as Britain's pioneering efforts with railways landed us with a restrictive loading gauge (because in 1850 no-one had any idea how big railway vehicles could get), so it was with canals. In the 18th century the typical narrowboat (6' 10" wide by 57' is the size needed to travel the entire national network) was perfectly adequate as all it had to compete with was the horse and cart. Those were the dimensions our canals were built for. In Europe they had the advantage of a later start, when it was obvious that canal craft could, and would have to be, larger, and (as mentioned already) they also had the geographical advantage of wider and longer rivers.
There's no way that the UK network of 'narrow' canals could economcially shoulder a significant part of our transport needs these days (leaving aside prospects like a sudden collapse in the fossil fuel supply with no alternative technology to take its place) but I'm sure its still under-used. For instance, given how many of our industrial cities are criss-crossed by canals right through the urban centre, why not distribute goods and materials by canal from out-of-town warehouses and distribution centres rather than by a fleet of 7.5-ton lorries? It won't be practical in every (or even most) cases but it must be viable in some. The building of the Olympic Park in Stratford made excellent use of the canals and waterways for delivering construction materials and removing spoil - I'm sure there are other places were that would be appropriate.
And there is a lot of scope for the 'wide' canals to be better-used. There's no physical reason why that trade in newsprint I mentioned earlier couldn't still go from Hull to Derby via the Trent. I know quite a lot of oil/petroleum products still goes out of the Humber inland by boat. In East Anglia places like King's Lynn, Boston, Sutton Bridge, Wisbech and even Peterborough could physically take European-style sea-going vessels if there were the wharfs and facilities in place to service them.
Of course it would all come down to economics, and in the world we inhabit at the moment it's more economical to distribute things by road. But in terms of sustainability, efficiency and ecology it's got to be better by water.
2xChevrons said:
And there is a lot of scope for the 'wide' canals to be better-used. There's no physical reason why that trade in newsprint I mentioned earlier couldn't still go from Hull to Derby via the Trent. I know quite a lot of oil/petroleum products still goes out of the Humber inland by boat. In East Anglia places like King's Lynn, Boston, Sutton Bridge, Wisbech and even Peterborough could physically take European-style sea-going vessels if there were the wharfs and facilities in place to service them.
Of course it would all come down to economics, and in the world we inhabit at the moment it's more economical to distribute things by road. But in terms of sustainability, efficiency and ecology it's got to be better by water.
The Wash ports KL, Boston etc, they're fine for intra EU trade, and there is still a reasonable amount of trade through there, but they can only take a 2500t vessels. Fine for sending some wheat to Germany, or some scrap metal up the coast, but not much more than that. Much of our trade from Europe is valuable enough, and time sensitive enough, that it goes by road or rail. Ships are only used for low value bulky stuff, which we dont do a lot of. Of course it would all come down to economics, and in the world we inhabit at the moment it's more economical to distribute things by road. But in terms of sustainability, efficiency and ecology it's got to be better by water.
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