>> 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.
>
So cut out the trans-shipping & use road transport all the way for small
stuff.
That's what more or less killed non-bulk rail freight in the end. Rail &
water both work best for a steady long term flow of non-urgent, bulk
freight between fixed points.
I live in an area (The Potteries) that wouldn't have been industrialised
initially if it hadn't been for the canal, & historically, most of the
potteries were built on the canal bank after it opened. Earlier
potteries were built near the coal pits & the clay pits, but closed down
one by one after the canal opened & moved to the canal bank. Then the
railway was built & they all moved again to be close to the railway,
but without any great urgency, as the railway line originally followed
the canal within a couple of hundred yards. Later potteries & other
factories were built along the rail network as it expanded to meet the
needs of the coal industry. Then road transport became cheap & they
mostly stayed where they were, as transport costs became independent of
location. New potteries were built for easy road access, but not many moved.
> 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!
>
That compares directly with the road network in an old town & the new
bypass. Or the main line/ branch line rail network.
> 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?
>
A business plan could, no doubt, be put together for any pair of places,
which either would, or would not, show a potential profit
It's obvious that a plan that didn't show a profit would not be used.
>
>> 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?
>
More like 9. Not a viable canal route at current fuel & labour rates
> 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.
>
To roughly work out journey times on a canal, take an average of 3 miles
an hour, & count a lock as a mile. Knock a bit off for a commercial crew
on a well maintained canal with decent depth of water. 16 miles of canal
plus 13 locks is 29 lock miles, so more like 8 or 9 hours, so you'd not
use boats on that route at current fuel & labour costs.
>> 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.
>
I am not claiming that the canal network could answer all transport
problems, but if there are pairs of points that can sensibly be linked
by water, then it may well be cheaper than by road. The London to
Birmingham case I worked out as a business plan many years ago as being
economical for drums of chemicals being transported from a particular
canalside business in Brentford to another in Birmingham. Transit time
wasn't important, as long as regular shipments occurred. The client
wanted 10 or 15 tons a week, & was happy for 40 tons to arrive at a
time. Transport cost by water worked out at about half what was being
charged for moving the same stuff by lorry & I would have been making
quite a nice living. Rail would have been even better for the route *if*
both factories had a siding & British Rail had still been doing
wagonload transport. Of course, British Rail freight rates were more
politically dictated than related to actual costs.
The Twyfords link was another place where it was ideal to use a canal,
as both factories were on the same canal, on the same level.
Canals haven't linked to anywhere useful in an industrial sense for
several decades now because the railway in the 19th century could
generally beat them on speed, not to mention most canals being bought up
by the railway companies then deliberately run down, so new factories
were built to take advantage of rail links, especially with the rail
companies subsidising the building of sidings to link factories to the
main line. A development parallelled by the decline of the rail network
since lorries became the favoured means of goods transport, with the
government subsidising the building of road links to new factories.
There are a lot of empty brownfield sites round the Wolverhampton level
that could use canal connections between them instead of road transport,
if there was a reason to build there.
--
Tciao for Now!
John.
