Warren Branch

[teaky]

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/narrow-boats-in-disguise/

 

[AlfaZagato]

At this rate, you should make your canal extension into another lifting cameo.   Maybe even animate it.

[Schooner]

19 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

estimate

Measure. There's a tool in the top right hand corner of the screen (on the georeferenced maps, at least) which is dead handy

[Pacific231G]

9 minutes ago, teaky said:

I don't know for certain but a butty could probably be manouvered into and out of a lock by hand using ropes.

 

There are a couple of long tunnels on the northern section of the Worcester and Birmingham canal which do not have have towpaths.  Legging ceased to be an option when traffic levels became too high and the canal company introduced two boats (one at each tunnel) to tow several narrow boats through at a time.  This gradually became unnecessary once motor boats became more common.  No locks involved at these sections though.

 

On wider (barge) canals it wasn't unusual to have a butty tied alongside the motor boat rather than pulled behind.  I have a feeling I've seen a photo of this arrangement with a further butty being towed but I can't swear to that.

 

I see that sometimes now. There's someone who supplies fuel etc. to boats on the GUC and they often have a motor and a butty alongside. I think they're both narrow boats so there's more than enough width.

[MrWolf]

1 hour ago, Nick C said:

 

But then you'd have someone come along and tell you that they didn't use that particular design of periscope until after the war...

 

Sadly you're right.....

[moore43grm]

You could go for a Tom Pudding !

 

[chuffinghell]

30 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

I think you may be overthinking this Adrian and Chris there's no reason at all why you can't have a hos. The side of the canal the pumphouse is on is irrelevant.

 

I live close to the GUC in W. London and, though most were on the far side, there were several factories and warehouses with wharves on the towing path side. The canal wasn't widened to accomodate these as it was already wide enough to enable two boats to pass one another and moored boats with room to spare. A wharf would though generally be wider than the towing path alone.

 

To give a few examples, the pumping station on the Wendover Arm (which actually waters the GUC)  is on the towing path side and in steam days that  would have taken coal from narrow boats or barges.  Further up the GUC, at the south end of Leighton Buzzard, there's an old wharf with inset two foot gauge track on it that used to bring sand from one of the quarries and that's also on the towing path side.

Larger works like timber or steel stockyards often had travelling cranes whose support girders stuck out over the canal but, so long as a crane had a long enough reach to be mounted on the other side of the towpath (which is anyway quite narrow) that would be entirely feasible.

With motorised boats there was obviously no problem but even with horse power,  getting a boat past a moored one was no real problem and actually rather easier than passing another horse drawn boat which of course happened all the time. Boats have a lot of momentum and very little resistance so you'd just slacken the tow, lift it above the moored boat or boats as you passed  and resume the tow once clear.  They often had to to this anyway when the tow path changed sides and though there were ingenious bridges that avoided the need to actually drop the tow these were by no means universal. 

 

What does strike me about this plan though is that the canal now seems a tad wide- though the bit under the roadbridge is fine and very nicely modelled. It costs money to cut a canal so, unless they were sharing the bed with a river they weren't any wider than they needed to be which is why they have special winding holes to turn boats around. The bend would be wider to let boats pass but no wider than needed, If you go to the National Library of Scotlands's map collection, any relevant OS 25 inch to the mile map will enable you to estimate the width of various canals and see the arrangement of wharves etc.

Very interesting and useful, thank you.

 

Ideally the width under the bridge should really be narrower but it was a compromise because the arch of the bridge was quite wide so I just tried to make it look right proportionally as a pose to dimensionally accurate 

perhaps instead of widening it at the pump house end I could leave it as originally intended and maybe get away with having the canal sides parallel (ish) as beyond the bridge the canal is 25ft wide

 

 

I think with a boat moored there is enough room for another to pass?

 

 

[chuffinghell]

Anyway, in the meantime don’t ask me to do cake icing....

 

 

....it’s not pretty 

[Rowsley17D]

9 minutes ago, chuffinghell said:

Anyway, in the meantime don’t ask me to do cake icing....

 

 

....it’s not pretty 

 

It doesn't need to be, it's not a bowling green and it's going under scenic materials.

[Pacific231G]

22 minutes ago, chuffinghell said:

Very interesting and useful, thank you.

 

Ideally the width under the bridge should really be narrower but it was a compromise because the arch of the bridge was quite wide so I just tried to make it look right proportionally as a pose to dimensionally accurate 

p

 

 

 

 

It looks alright to me. Ballot Box Bridge on the Paddington Arm of the GUC is near me and I don't think it's that different from yours exept that the towing path is a bit narrower (a bit too narrow given the way some cyclists charge through it)  and the canal wider

Ballot Box Bridge Perivale CC BY-SA 2.0 c. Derek Harper

 

 

 

[MrWolf]

Hm, following on from the Tom pudding picture....if that pump house by the canal was an engine house, you could use it to power a model of this, a combination of canal and railway..... 

 

Pictures Leicestershire museums.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 4, 2020 by MrWolf

[Pacific231G]

21 hours ago, teaky said:

I don't know for certain but a butty could probably be manouvered into and out of a lock by hand using ropes.

 

There are a couple of long tunnels on the northern section of the Worcester and Birmingham canal which do not have have towpaths.  Legging ceased to be an option when traffic levels became too high and the canal company introduced two boats (one at each tunnel) to tow several narrow boats through at a time.  This gradually became unnecessary once motor boats became more common.  No locks involved at these sections though.

 

On wider (barge) canals it wasn't unusual to have a butty tied alongside the motor boat rather than pulled behind.  I have a feeling I've seen a photo of this arrangement with a further butty being towed but I can't swear to that.

 

There is still one long tunnel on the St. Quentin Canal in Picardy at Riqueval  that at three and a half miles long is too long to ventilate sufficiently for motor powered barges. So, barges  were towed through in long lines of up to thirty at a time by an electric chain tug that took a couple of hours. It still runs but, with far less commercial traffic on the canal, only on demand with 48 hours notice.

600 V trolley wires hanging from the low roof of a dripping canal tunnel- what could possible go wrong?  The bargees are advised to stay below deck while making the trip and,since they don't have to steer, normally just have a long relaxed lunch or a kip. 

c Kris Roelants Creative commons CC by  SA3

I once saw this beast emerging from the tunnel and it was extraordinary with its whirling drums and clanking chain  pulling about eight large motor barges (the sort where the skipper can park the family car on the hatch cover)

There used to be several of these in France but the Mauvages tunnel's chain tug was retired in 2013 and boats now have to go through under their own power, one at a time, accompanied by an agent on a bicycle . 

Other long tunnels in France had electric towing railways which at 2 miles an hour must have been the most boring train driving job ever. The last of these closed in 1977* and were the remnants of a chain of metre and 60cm canal towing railways that, until November 1970,  ran alongside  about eleven hundred kilometres of canal between Dunkerque and the Swiss border near Mulhouse with branches to Lille etc.

 

 

Small electric tractors each  hauled two to four barges at three or four miles an hour and, when they met a tractor coming the other way, slickly swapped tow ropes and went back the way they'd came. However all that is 

 

*Because the electric tug was so slow a kilometre of the metre gauge towing railway was retained at each end of the Mauvages tunnel and, with two tractors coupled together, basically grabbed the tow rope when the tug emerged and yanked the train of barges out of the tunnel at rather better speed. This continued until the late 1980s. I came across it by chance in 1997 and was astonished to find the railway intact (though the overhead wire, full of copper, had been wisely removed) and three of the towing tractors in perfect condition in a shed at one end

c. David Thomas 1997

At the other end of the tunnel two more were parked under a road bridge in rather more rusty condition.

c. David Thomas 1997

The chain tug was still in daily use but I didn't see that one working.  The railway has all gone now of course though one of the tractors has been repainted and plinthed near the tunnel. .

 

An electric tug on rails hauling a canal barge is apparently the most energy efficient way of moving cargo ever invented. using less energy than even a horse, though it was only in France that it was ever employed to such a large extent though the Tetlow canal near Berlin used a similar system at one time .

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 5, 2020 by Pacific231G
grammar

[chuffinghell]

57 minutes ago, MrWolf said:

Hm, following on from the Tom pudding picture....if that pump house by the canal was an engine house, you could use it to power a model of this, a combination of canal and railway..... 

 

Pictures Leicestershire museums.

 

 

 

 

behave! 

[MrWolf]

[57xx]

5 hours ago, chuffinghell said:

Anyway, in the meantime don’t ask me to do cake icing....

 

 

....it’s not pretty 

 

Can I suggest a better blend between the two slopes? The slope on the road side looks way too steep to support itself (refer back to earlier in the thread when you where doing the bridge over the railway). The distinct "valley" looks unnatural to my eye too.

[57xx]

Or... maybe add a retaining wall...

[chuffinghell]

12 hours ago, 57xx said:

 

Can I suggest a better blend between the two slopes? The slope on the road side looks way too steep to support itself (refer back to earlier in the thread when you where doing the bridge over the railway). The distinct "valley" looks unnatural to my eye too.

it’s just the first skim of filler, I’m building it up in layers

[Nick C]

17 hours ago, MrWolf said:

Hm, following on from the Tom pudding picture....if that pump house by the canal was an engine house, you could use it to power a model of this, a combination of canal and railway..... 

 

Pictures Leicestershire museums.

 

 

 

 

I'll see you that and raise you the Elbląg canal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbląg_Canal

 

[KNP]

13 hours ago, 57xx said:

Or... maybe add a retaining wall...

 

Nice picture but I'm looking at that lovely house with the unusual curved wall, roof detail and guttering sweeping around the corner.

Now if you modelled that most people would say, never in a million years!!!!!

but

somewhere

out there

is always an example of the unusual...

[chuffinghell]

1 minute ago, KNP said:

 

Nice picture but I'm looking at that lovely house with the unusual curved wall, roof detail and guttering sweeping around the corner.

Now if you modelled that most people would say, never in a million years!!!!!

but

somewhere

out there

is always an example of the unusual...

Can you imagine the mess I’d make trying to plaster a curved wall 

 

Still a work in progress but I really should leave it longer between the layers though

 

 

 

I stopped each layer short of the bridge wing wall so I can blend it once it’s cured, you can see each layer in this photo.

 

 

[chuffinghell]

I’ve used light weight filler before that I could have applied thicker but its become a solid brick in the bottom of the tub

 

I intended to call screwfix yesterday on my way home from work but I went into autopilot and made a beeline for home 

[chuffinghell]

20 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

......

Bridge 77 on Macclesfield Canal (Lambert's Lane)

© Copyright Martin Lack and licensed for reuse under CC BY-SA 2.0 (share alike)   

 

The bridge at Macclesfield is a work of art

 

20 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

......BTW i you really want to annoy the more fundamentalist canal enthusiasts, just describe a narrow boat as a barge. For some reason it drives them nuts...

[chuffinghell]

For information, Wilko quick dry filler is not ‘quick dry’ 

[Winslow Boy]

9 minutes ago, chuffinghell said:

For information, Wilko quick dry filler is not ‘quick dry’ 

Ah well that all depends upon your interpretation of the word quick. Obviously Wilkinson's definition is not as quick as yours.

[MrWolf]

8 minutes ago, chuffinghell said:

For information, Wilko quick dry filler is not ‘quick dry’ 

 

Hairdryer.

 

I use el cheapo Ever Build all purpose powder filler. Ok, you have to mix it, but it doesn't go off in the box. It also contains PVA. I daub it over stockinette car polishing cloth that I stretch over styrene or card formers and secure with a glue gun.