Canals were soon the backbone of the country's transport system. many of the pretty little remote canal villages we see now were once busy trading centres,
with warehouses, trans-shipment wharves, stables and hostelries catering for the heavy canal traffic of the Victorian era. However, competition was hotting up - railways.
Railways were faster. Rail track could be run uphill (- not well, but a whole lot better than water!) and that meant the routes were more direct. Railways didn't freeze up in the winter. But most seriously of all, railways were cheaper. Pretty soon, canals were where the smart money wasn't.
But the canal companies didn't lie down and die - oh no! They competed head to head. New canals now didn't meekly cuddle the landscape, they marched across it boldly. Hills - no problem. Get the Victorian engineers on the job!
At first, grouping locks into flights for efficient operation, with giant cuttings, tunnels and embankments was enough to ease the passage. The Aqueducts got bigger and bolder.
On the Langollen Canal in Wales the Mother of all Aqueducts (at Chirk) got a bigger sister (at Pontcysyllte) which allowed boats to drift noislessly
across the 1000 foot wide valley between the tops of the highest trees at a height of 120 feet. Due to a lack of barriers on one side, after crossing this aqueduct a change of underwear is frequently recommended.
Then the solutions grew ever more adventurous. At Foxton in
Leicestershire and 'inclined plane' dragged boats sideways up the hill in giant iron baths (Caissons).
At Anderton in Cheshire (1875), counterbalanced Caissons were lifted straight up by giant hydraulic rams. At Combe Hay in Somerset boats sailed into an airtight
'submarine' and floated up through a flooded vertical shaft to high level as air was pumped in. There is NO WAY you'd have got me in there!
However - competition was fierce. Boat companies encouraged their boaters to live on board with their families and work all hours. Their floating homes became
expressions of their Romany-style lives, and the Canal Art prospered, even if business didn't.
Perversely, buyers for the ailing canal companies were often the railways themselves. They betted on both horses - no doubt hoping that when the canals finally succumbed, they would be able to turn the routes into more railways. By and large, that didn't happen. Henry Ford gave them something else to think about. By the 1950's the railways were themselves fighting decline, as freight and passengers alike flocked to the roads. A new government initiative nationalised the railways and canals. In the interests of an 'Integrated transport Policy' a Corporate image was developed, and the colourful folk-art was all but erased from the nation's narrowboat fleet. This meant a wholesale carve-up. Many usable waterways were lost to irreversable decline, closure and development in this period - equalled in severity only by the disastrous carve-up of the local railway network.
The death knell of commercial canal transport finally sounded in 1962. The winter of '62 in Britain was one of those 'once a century' events. No, I'm not talking about a cut in income tax - but a Siberian freeze-up. No freight moved on the canals for almost six months - and by the time the thaw came in May there was no freight left to carry.
The end.
Or was it?
Come back soon to find out about the resurrection of the British Canal system, and the heroic campaigners who gave up asking and got stuck in with a shovel.
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