noise."Story Notes: Canal Boat · 3:13am May 31st, 2020
Let’s talk about canals and canal boats!
Back in the day, there were two ways to get things from place to place. You could put it on a wagon, or you could put it on a boat. In terms of carrying capacity, the boat was way better, but obviously the boat could only go where there was water. The obvious solution was to build water ‘roads,’ and that’s of course what a lot of countries did, at least up until the advent of practical trains.
Obviously, some canals are still in use, both commericially and recreationally, but they aren’t the mode of transport they once were.
Also, while historically most canal boats were pulled by mule or horse (or other beast of burden), these days the towpaths along the sides are rarely used for towing; most canal boats built in the last century have motors.
Besides railroads being generally cheaper to construct on a mile-by-mile basis, trains can do another thing that doesn’t come easy to a canal boat--going up and down hills (this holds true for all boats, not just canal boats).
Locks solved that problem; an area big enough to hold at least one boat was walled off and had big doors on each end. To make sure that they would stay shut, they normally pointed towards the high side of the water.
A boat would go in, the door would be closed, and paddle gates would be opened (those are at the bottom of the lock basin); if the boat was going up, water would be added; if it was going down, water would drain out. The water is, of course, self-leveling, so you didn’t have to worry about a bump as you left the lock. Naturally, lock mechanisms were complicated and time-consuming to use, although one lake freighter on the Great Lakes set a record passage through the Soo Locks when it didn’t stop before colliding with the uphill locks, broke the doors, and surfed through to the low water side. This is not the recommended way of transiting locks; even if your boat makes it through, all the other boats that can’t until the locks are fixed will be very upset with you.
If you needed to gain or lose a lot of elevation, there would be multiple locks, one right after the other.
Historically, canals also crossed over valleys on viaducts, crossed over other canals and railroads on bridges, and also had some boat lifts. The boat lifts generally had two basins, and because of physics, both basins would weigh the same whether there was a barge in them or not, or how loaded the barge in each basin was, which meant that you didn’t need a rediculously powerful motor to run it up and down (obviously, given the weight of water, you still did need a substantial structure).
Flash Lock is named after one of the earliest types of lock, basically a wooden dam to keep the water in the upper canal at the right level; when a boat wanted passage, they’d take the boards out and let it surf downstream. They were often used in conjunction with millponds, so that boats could still navigate that river.
Swanky Brook is named after the Sankey Brook Navigation, which is claimed to be the first entirely artifical canal since most of it ran alongside Sankey Brook (proponents of the Bridgewater Canal say theirs was first, since the last 400 meters of the Sankey Brook Canal ran through Sankey Brook).
Mersey is named after the River Mersey; several readers pointed out in the comments that her name reminded them of the song Ferry Cross the Mersey. As well it should; they’re both about the same river.
Aire and Calder Navigation Co is named after a canal which debuted in 1703. Roses and castles were common design motifs on canal boats during the late 1800s.
Stroudwate and Fens Junction are named for places on the British canal system. Fens is actually named after the Fens Waterways Link. While I don’t know off the top of my head if any towns were named after a canal junction, there are several towns in the US that were named after a rail junction.
Coal barges (and ore boats) did used to be unloaded by travelling cranes; these days faster systems tend to be in use. Hulett ore unloaders were famously huge, the container cranes of their day.
There are in fact canal tunnels. Just like with railroads, sometimes the most efficient way to get past an obsticle was to just tunnel through it. The one in the story is inspired by the Harecastle tunnel on the Trent & Mersey canal.
Rope ferries are boats which are pulled across a river by a rope, or in some cases by an angled rope that causes the current to push them across. There are also chain boats, but that’s a different thing.
Reuben the railroad engineer pony was named after the Reuben Wells*, an 0-10-0 steam locomotive which was famous for pushing trains up the nearly 6% grade in Madison, IN. It did that for 30 years, until it was retired, and eventually made its way to the children’s museum in Indianapolis. [*The locomotive was named after Reuben Wells, who designed it.]
Food barges do exist; however, they’re not common in the US.
Basins were often used before locks and other places where canal traffic would slow down. From what I’ve seen in pictures, canal boats in the US ran on the wrong side (compared to modern traffic); it doesn’t really matter which side they run on, as long as all of them are doing the same thing.
HIstorically, boats were sometimes winched into the docks, either by human power, horsepower, or steam engine. Ships are pulled through the Panama Canal by locomotive.
I am unaware of there being any canals built through a lake, although it’s doable. Causeways have been built across lakes, and if you have two of them, you have a canal. It only gets complicated if you want there to be passage from lake to canal and vice versa.
Large open rooms where you can get a bed for a night are not all that common now, but were quite commonplace back in the day. Liveries are where you can rent horses, wagons, tack, and many of them offered other equine services as well.
Source (Yes, most of y’all will have seen that picture already)
I’m indebted to Winter Quill for sending me a video of a horse pulling a canal boat:
I’d been thinking of canal boats off and on since then, and have watched many CruisingTheCut videos--in fact, a lot of features in this story arc were inspired by things I saw in his videos.
Obviously, these days most of the surviving canals don’t have useable towpaths for their whole length. From a writing persepctive, one of the things I had to constantly think about was where the towing pony is, where the rope is, and what happens when you need to cross an obsticle.
In real life, the boats were probably brought into the locks by manpower or winches, while the team of horses pulling went around and got a break until it was time to hitch back up and get moving again. Bridges would have to had at least one towpath; two if simultaneous traffic in both directons was expected. Likewise, any boat moored on the shore would be an obsticle to towing, and of course any side docks or canals would have to be crossed by the towing horse.
Historically, I doubt the canal was often crossed by having the horse go the length of the barge, or ride it to the opposite shore, but there’s no reason why a pony wouldn’t do that. I would expect that fording crossings were somewhat commonplace; according to some research I did, the standard depth of a canal was 7 feet (2.2m) and a barge’s draft was just under 6’ (1.8m) in France. However, the French map on that article shows many canals were less than that, some just over 3’ (1 meter), which is easily fordable by a horse (six feet might be; I don’t know how much of the horse has to be in water before it’s swimming rather than walking).
One free internet to the first person to identify the human woman who works at a knick-knack shop.
Also, if you like boats and rivers, check out Georg’s The One Who Got Away and Drifting Down the Lazy River.
So glad we live in the modern age where we can research such things from the comfort of our homes. :) Those poor people in days long past actually had to *travel* to the places they wanted to write about to understand their details.
5272252
Or have a good enough imagination to fake it.
"Why, yes, there are Giant Flying Scorpions near Coventry as per my article. How dare you question my many months of research!"
indistinct mumble
"You're what?"
louder indistinct mumble
"Oh, I see, the mayor of Coventry. Ahh. Hmm. Well, um, okay. Wait, you know what? You're just a mayor, not a respected column writer for newspapers, what would you know?!?!"
5272237
Hannah Hawes?
Speaking of human barge haulers, there is this classic song with a classic painting- The song of the Volga boatmen. I like the Red Army Chorus version with Kharitonov more, but it doesn't have the Repin painting in the video.
My thoughts were:
A - I have watched waaay too much Crusingthecut for this to be anything other than familiar
B - I thought Fens Junction was an outright reference to Georg's story
C - I have seen a food barge before - there's a bunch of Kayak rental places on the Mohican River, and some enterprising individual has a barge made out of two old canoes that has a grill on it - they do brisk business on the nice days.
Only you, Admiral.
I'd imagine that'd have something to do with the rudder typically being mounted to the starboard side of a vessel when it's not in the rear center. 'Starboard' coming from 'steerboard,' (and 'port' being the opposite side because you don't want to crush your rudder against the docks) as most folks are right-handed. At least, I'm pretty sure that's why it do. And that would make sense why you wouldn't want your rudder to be against the wall of a canal.
This is the kind of fun post that makes me wish I could leave it an upvote.
Fun fact #1 I'll add to things: As many canals are still there today, you can go to England and for a low price rent a small canal boat for pretty cheap, and then tour the canals for a few weeks! Pretty cool stuff!
Fun Fact #2: A lot of people still live on canal boats in England, basically in long narrow houseboats, moored wherever.
Canal boats and canals a great bit of "hidden history" you don't hear much about anymore, but that left an impact that you can still see.
The shot of the horses running up to the fence was lovely! The rest of the video was great as well. I can see I'm going to lose some time to his channel. makes me want to do another canal trip... once the current Armageddon has burnt itself out.
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Yes! You win an internet!
Canals are cool. Especially considering the alternative.
The fun thing about Canals in the UK is that there are primarily Two main types of canal, broad, and narrow, where the term Narrowboat comes from. Narrow is just that, pretty much the size of a horse pulled cart at 6 foot, 6 foot 6. These single boat locks are so narrow they generally only have a single gate at each end. The other thing to note about Narrow Canals in the UK is that they are almost All grouped in the middle of the overall network, with Broad canals to teh north and south. Sort of like a Canal Oreo?
I think Summit Tunnel is the one that holds teh records in the UK? Its the Highest, Deepest and Longest Canal tunnel in the UK? Im not sure about Longest, things get a little confusing 8} As in it passes through range of hills that are so tall, it has to climb along the valleys to teh highest point above sea level, at which point the hill climbs even further above it than the amount of ground over any other tunnel.
The gets confusing because the Rochdale canal doesnt go through a tunnel at all, while the Railway built afterwards next to it, goes through its own Summit Tunnel.
Some of the reservoirs for catching water to feed the canals, can be several miles away from the actual canal, the water coming down channels or even piped, while one canal locally has its main feeder reservoir supplied by a channel and pipe taking water from a large weir on the river several miles upriver of the point where the river flows past the supply reservoir. I havent seen recently the fate of the supply channel, as the maps say a railway branch tunneld under it at one point, and a housing company ripped out the tunnel to put houses there on teh long disused line, so no idea if a bridged channel or siphone was included or the flow just cut.
5272315 already explained why it does matter when it comes to boats, but this is still true of cars. In fact, it's true of a lot of other driving rules as well; being able to predict what the people around you are going to do is usually more important than what the things they're going to do actually are, at least when it comes to your own safety.
Very interesting information and quite informative, I always wanted to ride on those kinds of boats since I live a short drive away from the more famous, in my eyes, Falkirk Wheel.
I already knew a few things about canals, but interesting and educational (about a variety of things, canals and otherwise!) as usual; thanks, also as usual. :D
(And that's another of those stories I keep meaning to read more of...)
And I enjoyed the videos. :)
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Although to be honest, if I could have written this from a canal boat being pulled lazily down a canal by a horse, I totally would have.
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True story, I sometimes put in enough details around a real place that I sometimes forget the fictional details I add are, well, fictional. When I was last in South Haven, I half expected to see a boat with a plucky blue pegasus sailing out of the harbor.
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That’s a great painting
I do know that song, too.
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Nothing wrong with that
Legit didn’t occur to me until people were commenting on it, and then I was like, “oh, yeah, the Barony of Fens.”
There’s a few places you can make a go of it in the US--I did look up to see if they were a thing that existed--but from what I gathered, you need a lot of consistent boat traffic to make it worth the investment. I’ve never seen one myself, but I have been to some touristy places where someone could make a go of at at least during a festival.
5272315
That’s why you love me.
It’s certainly possible that’s where the tradition started, although by the time the canals were built, most if not all barges would have had a central rudder. Obviously, a lot of boating is based on tradition going back centuries, and it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that they normally ran them that way because that was how it had always been done. Interestingly, on inland waterways at least, two boats meeting head-on are supposed to pass port-to-port, which is opposite the way they ran ‘em on the canals.
Also, I just realized from looking that up, most small powerboats have the steering wheel on the starboard side.
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That would actually be a lot of fun to do! One year when I was a kid, we rented a pontoon boat at Lake Cumberland in Kentucky, and that was a lot of fun.
Yup! And one of the inspirational videos for this involved a couple who had a pair of canal boats that went and brought supplies to those houseboats.
Which is a shame, because there are lots of canals still around, even in the US. Admittedly, I’ve never visited one in the US; I tend to get my on-the-water time on the Great Lakes or local rivers.
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All the horses gotta check out the new pony
There’s a similar shot when Sandra’s taking a horse tour of Conmerra, and a bunch of horses trot over to check out Flora.
That’s something that I’d like to do someday, as well. In the interim, perhaps I could get a canoe and take a river trip . . . the weather’s getting nice, and it’s easy to maintain social distancing in a canoe.
5272355
Enough global warming, and the Northwest Passage might be doable.
Also, am I correct in remembering that the HMS Terror was one of those ships that got stuck in the ice, floated free, and then drifted around for a while, or was that a different one?
Canal locks are super crazy interesting physics, especially if you want to save the water from the lock to reuse it rather than just dump it downstream. Canals as a whole are kind of mindblowing, honestly. When I think about the amount of work that went into them, it’s astounding - and yet I can only tell you where all of 2 are (that being the Panama and Erie).
Basically, I love canal stuff.
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I would have to imagine that some of that was due to what kind of traffic they expected, local terrain, etc. When I was looking up canal depths, I noticed that in France, the standard depth of a canal was 1.8m, but that there were a number of them which were only 1m deep. Probably a lot of them, they had plans to make them bigger later on when they got more money (a lot of railroads were initially constructed with that thought in mind), and proably for a lot of them, that never came to fruition becuase the railroads came along, or because they could transport what they needed to just fine with the canal the size it was.
I legit didn’t know until I was starting to do research for this story that canal tunnels were a thing that existed. In the one I saw in the video (Harecastle) I didn’t see any pathways for equines--I wonder if those were taken out when they got self-powered canal boats, or if some of those tunnels never had them, and they used a rope arrangement or something to pull the boat along.
Also, I just discovered that there was at least one swing bridge over a river on a canal, and probably more than one.
Yeah, that was one thing that I knew about canals but only touched on just a little bit in the story, there needs to be some kind of water supply that’s higher than the canal, and depending on the location and the amount of traffic through locks, you may want to keep some of the lock water back in reserve (like they do in the Panama Canal).
It’s kind of amazing to think that back in the day, the whole system worked on gravity, basically, and the idea that water would always seek its own level. Need to top off the canal? Run a pipe to a body of water that’s higher up, or if you can’t do that, build a water pump powered by a river that pumps river water up.
5272438
Yeah, and that’s one thing that self-driving cars suck at (so far). Maybe if all the cars are self-driving and all follow the rules correctly all the time, but since that’s not the case. . . .
There are a lot of customary behavior which are against the rules, too. Like, in Michigan, it’s illegal to make a left turn out of a driveway and into a center turn lane before then completing your left turn. I didn’t know that until I got pulled over for it; everybody does it. A computer system programmed with the rules of the road would expect a car in the center lane to want to make a left turn, whereas my experience would tell me that if it’s not by an intersection, it probably wants to merge in.
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Apparently you can rent ‘em, and there are some places where they offer horse-drawn canal boats.
The Falkirk wheel is impressive, not gonna lie, but at the same time, I have deep admiration for some of the Victorian engineering.
5272455
It’s a fascinating subject.
They’re well worth it.
Thanks! He’s got plenty, so you’ll never run out of things to learn about canals and canal boats.
5272648
Possibly a different one. Both the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were abandoned off the coast of King William Island. Terror was found in Terror Bay off the southwest coast of King William Island. Erebus was found in Wilmot and Crampton Bay west of the Adelaide Peninsula south of King William Island. "[Terror] was discovered 92 km (57 mi) south of the location where the ship was reported abandoned, and some 50 km (31 mi) from the wreck of HMS Erebus."
I quite enjoyed this, but... is this related to any particular story of yours?
5272711
Yes, it’s the Canal Boat arc from Field Notes from Equestria. I thought I tagged FNFE in the post; here’s a link to the start of this arc in case I forgot.
5272344
Thanks! I'd like to share it.
I remember hearing the Song of the Volga Boatmen sung by actual classically trained singers for the first time, and wondering how many Americans had first heard it because of cartoons.
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No, you tagged that; I just managed to miss it!
5272648
That's the theory. No one know for sure how far it drifted, since everyone had abandoned the two ships and wound up being driven insane by lead poisoning, eating each other or dropping dead from scurvy. Really that incident was horrific enough without adding supernatural demons stalking the men like the book and miniseries decided to do.
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Best Scottish literature. Rowling aint got crap on Kenneth Grahame. Makes me want to put my boot up the ass of people who think "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" refers to Pink Floyd.
5272809
Too right, mate!
5272661
:)
Oh, I don't doubt it!
:)
5272652
"I legit didn’t know until I was starting to do research for this story that canal tunnels were a thing that existed."
Ah, that was something I already knew. I remember in particular one tunnel, though I'm afraid I forget the name, where the propulsion method was "lie down on top of the boat and push on the ceiling with your hands and feet, because it's that low".
As for Harecastle and propulsion, from that video, I don't see how they'd have fit animal towing through the smallest sections. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe, indeed, ropes, or just people poling the boats along (while some sections of that tunnel certainly look low enough for the method I mentioned above, others don't).
(As an aside, I do wonder why that tunnel has such a smaller section in the middle. I kind of wonder if they started the tunnel at both ends with plans to make it the same size all the way through... then, several times, realized they didn't have the budget and/or time to finish it at the current size and stepped it down.)
re the swing bridge:
Ooh! Neat! That Ididn'tknow about!"there needs to be some kind of water supply that’s higher than the canal"
I also remember one canal that was fed by the water pumped out of a mine. As I recall/understand, the mine owner basically looked at their need to get rid of water from the mine, looked at their need to ship things in and out, and decided that it would be practical to combine the two.
Ah, looks like that was here.
(That YouTube channel I think has the full series of that documentary, I think, if you're interested. Well, you know, at least for now, but no one's seemed in a great hurry to take them down.)
...
And then I watched further on in that, and it actually shows a canal swing bridge. And I know I've watched that video before. Oops! Not sure why that didn't stick in my memory more...
5272648
Also, I've checked sea level rise maps, and if they and my interpretations are right, if sea level rise ends up near the upper end of the current plausible expectation range, the Panama Canal stops needing locks.
5272638
"Which is a shame, because there are lots of canals still around, even in the US."
Aye. And I think it'd be worthwhile to look into refurbishing them and digging more, too. The construction could provide jobs, from planners and surveyors down through machine operators to potentially just men with shovels and wheelbarrows, and an operational canal can be a very energy efficient way to move cargo, provided it doesn't have to go too fast. Even more that freight rail.
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I can’t think of which cartoon it might have been used in, but I can say that I first heard some classical music in Bugs Bunny cartoons, so it’s certainly very possible a cartoon could have been my first encounter.
5272650
I know a little bit about it; came across it in research and Grady (I think it is) from Practical Engineering covered it in a video. I thought about including it, but the way their canal system was working, they probably wouldn’t need it, and it was sort of off-topic for the story.
Canal locks are super crazy interesting physics, especially if you want to save the water from the lock to reuse it rather than just dump it downstream.
That’s its own separate category of interesting engineering
The US also has the C&O canal, which parallels the Potomic, and I’m sure there are others. There’s one that cuts across the Hudson north of NYC, can’t remember what it’s called (it’s short). There’s also the Suez canal, between the Med. and the Red Sea; that one’s also really important for shipping. Venice has lots of canals, and England famously does, too. Russia has a famously stupid one. France also has an extensive canal network (which I found out doing research for comments), as do the Netherlands; I’d imagine most European have at least some. And it is an insane amount of work, and a lot of it was done before mechanization, just lots of people with shovels.
5272705
Yeah, I think you’re right. The one I’m thinking about drifted around for years, possible decades, occasionally showing up I think into the sixties. Let’s see if my google-fu is on point . . . .
SS Baychimo is the one I was thinking of. Abandoned in 1931 near Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow) when she became trapped in pack ice, she was occasionally spotted through the years; the last known sighting was in the 60s.
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5272777
That wasn’t the one I was thinking of (it was the SS Baychimo, which drifted in and out of pack ice for more than 30 years before disappearing). Looking at the Wikipedia, it seems like the Terror and Erebus became stuck and were abandoned, but were never spotted again after their entrapment (granted, I just skimmed, so I might have missed potential later sightings of them).
5273145
Yeah, that was my thought, too. Unless the channel was shallow enough that the towing animal could walk on the bottom.
<checks Wikipedia, which I should have did sooner>
From reading the whole article (which I should have did sooner), the second tunnel (the one that he went through in the video) did have a towpath, and also had side canals which went right to the coal mines. Then, from 1914-1954, an electric tug was used to pull boats through. The towpath was removed in the 70s.
Maybe it settled through the years? I don’t know if that’s possible, but it seems like it might be. The wikipedia article mentioned that they had engineering problems when they built it, and now that I read the full article, it says that the Telford tunnel (the one currently in use) “began to suffer from subsidence,” so maybe it was taller when built.
The article on the Harecastle tunnel says that they did that in Harecastle, although the article doesn’t speficially say if that was to provide water for the canal, or it’s just becuase that was a convenient place to get rid of it.
Brindly’s the one who built the old tunnel at Harecastle, too. And the Bridgewater Canal is the one that claims to be the first, arguing that Sankey Brook wasn’t entirely artificial.
That’s a big advantage for shipping! Not so much for anybody who lives in a coastal region or on an island, though.
I don’t know that they’re that practical, especially in terms of new ones. Your big rail freight advantage would be if you could dig a canal from LA to St. Louis, and I don’t see that being feasable. Or cheap. Expecially since to make it practical, you’d have to either make it big enough for a container ship, or else offload all the containers on a series of barges. It’d be way cheaper to electrify large portions of the rail network and run it with renewables.
5273644
Me too. I think Looney Tunes were responsible for a lot of folks first exposure to classical music.
5273668
"Yeah, that was my thought, too. Unless the channel was shallow enough that the towing animal could walk on the bottom."
Hm, hadn't thought of that. I don't know if I've ever heard of that being done.
Ah, I do, though, now that you've brought it up recall that I had heard of legging before. Just didn't think of it then. That'd make sense, though.
re the description of the canal he went through: Oh, neat! I did think I saw some things near the entrances that might have been towpath remnants, but I recall not seeing access to it on at least one side and, of course, the tunnel got so small. However, in addition to the possibility that I just missed the access, or it was covered over:
"Maybe it settled through the years? I don’t know if that’s possible, but it seems like it might be. The wikipedia article mentioned that they had engineering problems when they built it, and now that I read the full article, it says that the Telford tunnel (the one currently in use) “began to suffer from subsidence,” so maybe it was taller when built."
that does make sense for how it might have been different originally.
Oh, and I do see towpath access still on the portal he came out of, in the picture on the Wikipedia page (which I'm also looking at now); I thought I remembered that, but then I didn't see it at the portal he went in through when I went back to check and, well, being low on time then as well (busy these past few days, and not done yet), I just thought I'd likely misremembered, since no room for a towpath inside and no towpath access at one end makes towpath access at the other end not very useful.
However, looking at the picture of that portal on the Wikipedia page, I think it may add weight to a hypothesis I'd been having writing this: that the towpath access was removed when the fans and doors were put in. It looks somewhat as if the portal building was built over and in front of an existing portal.
Oh, wow, and I wasn't misinterpreting you: at least according to Wikipedia, the tunnels to the mines do indeed branch off from inside the main tunnel. Cool! I don't recall seeing any signs of them, though; perhaps those sections weren't shown in the video, or maybe they'd ended up mostly underwater. Or I could just have missed them, not knowing to look for them, depending on what they looked like.
"The article on the Harecastle tunnel says that they did that in Harecastle, although the article doesn’t speficially say if that was to provide water for the canal, or it’s just becuase that was a convenient place to get rid of it."
I'm guessing more the latter there, but I suspect the canal company could make use of the boost.
"Brindly’s the one who built the old tunnel at Harecastle, too. And the Bridgewater Canal is the one that claims to be the first, arguing that Sankey Brook wasn’t entirely artificial."
Thanks.
"
"
:D
"That’s a big advantage for shipping! Not so much for anybody who lives in a coastal region or on an island, though."
Yep! As I recall, about the same amount of sea level rise, just looking at the United States, makes Memphis, Tennessee a seaport, converts the Northeast Megalopolis into a giant fish habitat, and turns a big chunk of California's Central Valley into a second bay. And what's a "Florida"? Among other changes.
Yeah, it wouldn't work for transcontinental container traffic, or a number of other route-cargo combinations; rail freight would still have a place. I can still see it being useful in shorter-range applications with smaller-chunked cargos, though, especially with higher energy prices.
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I bet a wet harness chafes something terrible. I know wet underwear sucks, and I’m not all that fond of wet jeans, either.
I hadn’t, and now I wonder how commonplace it was that there was a term for it.
re the description of the canal he went through: Oh, neat! I did think I saw some things near the entrances that might have been towpath remnants, but I recall not seeing access to it on at least one side and, of course, the tunnel got so small. However, in addition to the possibility that I just missed the access, or it was covered over:
I think that’s what happened, yeah. IIRC, the Wikipedia says more or less that fans were added, a door was added, and the towpath was removed to improve ventilation (being lazy and not looking the article up again) :P
Yeah, or they could have filled them in when they’d served their purpose--I’m no mining engineer, but I suspect that having a large volume of water above where you’re tunneling can lead to unfortunate accidents.
In The Great Escape, where the British POWs dug out of a German prison camp, they hid some of their excavated dirt in previous failed shafts--and once you were done using a hole in a mine, it might be cheaper and eaiser to put your extra dirt in an unused shaft, rather than carry it all the way up to the surface to get rid of it.
I’d imagine it would depend on the local terrain, but you’re right that they always lose water through the locks, so having extra probably wouldn’t hurt.
Luckily, Michigan’s far enough above sea level that we won’t have a problem. Although the Great Lakes have been higher than usual the past couple years, and beach mansions are sliding off into Lake Michigan after storms, so. . .
I don’t really see a good break-even point myself (construction vs. eventual savings) although there may be some places where stuff is or could be carried around an industry on canals.
Incidentally, there was a coal mine in Ohio IIRC that served a nearby power plant, and had its own electric railroad to haul the coal from the mine face to the power plant. Apparently, that was cheaper than conveyers. (I think the mine’s been closed and the railroad removed, but I don’t know for sure.)
5274536
Oh, aye, seems likely.
I'm not sure... but it is something that makes a smaller, and thus cheaper, tunnel useful in a way that a larger tunnel wouldn't be (at the cost, of course, of not being useful in a number of ways a larger tunnel would be). That seems like there'd be incentive to make use of it.
Right, that sounds like it about matches my memory too. :)
Oh, right, I think probably the tunnels were filled in, but it seems like there'd likely still be bricked-up arches or something.
Hm, interesting idea. No idea if that was used, but it certainly seems like ti could have been.
Right.
Right, but the Great Lakes aren't expected to rise anywhere near so much, as far as I know. And they're also giant reserves of fresh, drinkable, ready-for-irrigation water.
[shrugs]
Yeah, it's heavily dependent on local conditions and resources and what the economy's like... and with an infrastructure project like this, of course, a lot of that last is guessing about what the economy will be like decades and later in the future, not always the easiest thing to get right, to put it mildly!
Neat. :)
I think I may have heard about that before... but I remember it being out West somewhere, not in Ohio. So it could be one of us is misremembering the location, or it could be that there are actually at least two of those (which seems plausible).
5272286
I wouldn't put it past Trump to try shutting down American waterways to promote domestic oil and just to spite China. And between the OPEC price war and Russia's major spill disaster, things could get bad real fast.
I wonder what kind of shanties and work songs ponies have. Surely, more cheerful ones than the grim, tragic ones humans like. Even relatively gentle ones like Shenandoah and Shallow Brown and Byker Hill and Here's A Health to the Company are bittersweet.