> For a local trip within Birmingham
> or London, (if you stay on the waterway network), for instance, the boat
> can do almost as many trips as the lorry, as most of the time is waiting
> for loading & unloading.
For companies that are as adjacent to a canal as they are to a road.
Which isn't many, and historically wasn't many: both the railways and
the canals ran fleets of horse-drawn carts, and later small vans and
lorries, to move goods from the rail/canal head to the actual end
points.
For anywhere with hills, you can only serve real businesses by
accepting a contour canal or locks, neither of which are good for
timings. A cycle ride along the Birmingham new Main Line will show
that there never were businesses along the straightened canal once you
get past the Smethwick junction, for the simple reason that most of
the line between there and Bromford junction is in deep cutting.
There were plenty of businesses along the old main line, because it
all ran at surface level, but that carries a penalty in both distance
and lockage. There's a reason why the old main line had innumerable
side arms, while the new main line has virtually none: there were no
businesses to which side arms could be built, because they're all up
at the top of the cutting!
The Worcester and Birmingham suffers from the same problem on a
smaller scale, running in cutting or on embankment (or through land
you could never build on) until about Kings Norton --- the only major
business it ever served was Cadbury's --- and is massively constrained
for any future development by the adjacency of the BWSR. And the
inner section of the Grand Union and the Warwick Junction are both
slow because of locks. About the only stretch of industrial canal
with reasonable access is the Grand Union out from Bordesley. Just
what businesses would you plan to serve from your water network?
> On this trip, a single boat would carry as much
> as a single articulated lorry per day,
What trip? Define some end points. I can cycle from my house, onto
the canal at Bournville Station (ie Cadbury's, a major factory that
might want to distribute products to shops), and be at Spaghetti
Junction (ie Salford Junction) about forty five minutes later. To
drive it's about twenty minutes when the roads are quiet, about thirty
five or forty in the rush hour. That's thirteen Farmer's Bridge locks
and eleven Aston locks, plus something like eight miles of canal.
Six hours?
What about home to where I work, which for the purposes at hand we can
regard as a mile or so from Catherine de Barnes on the Grand Union. I
don't cycle to work that way any more, but I think my best on that
route was about one hour thirty (although it needs a full suspension
mountain bike to cope with the state of tow path beyond Solihull).
I wouldn't drive by a remotely comparable route, but if I did, it'd
take an hour. Thirteen Farmer's Bridge locks, six Camp Hill locks,
sixteen miles of canal? Seven or eight hours by boat, I'd guess.
> ignoring the option to dump a
> trailer & go back for another one, but then again, you can, as used to
> be the case in Birmingham, use a tug & 2 or 3 boats. 30 horsepower
The Birmingham New Main Line doesn't link anywhere useful any more:
Round Oak Steel Works is a shopping centre.
ian
