Fens Yard
Fens Yard
Admiral Biscuit
The rudimentary ‘towpath’ inside the lock was made out of the same stones as the rest of the lock, wet and slick with algae. It was just there to give her someplace to walk before she boarded her barge, and not all the locks had them, since they were a danger to descending barges—they could catch their hulls on the stones and tip over as the water drained out.
There were bollards inset into the lock walls in case they needed to tie their barge off. Mersey had never seen anypony use them—it would be impossible for a descending barge to tie to them, and a rising barge would capsize itself if it were tied off.
She waited until the barge had bumped off the upstream gates and then jumped aboard, turning and pulling her towrope up behind her.
Up above them, Swanky shoved the lock gates shut. Some of the locks on side-canals were rarely used and had stiff gates; all the ones on the collier routes were easy to work.
There was a loud thud as the two gates slammed together, and she felt the barge move under her. Swanky trotted around to the upstream paddles and started turning the lever, and then the barge was moving backwards, bumping against the downstream gates as the water started filling the lock.
She watched the stone ‘towpath’ vanish under the water, turning greener and greener until it disappeared completely, and then she just watched their slow ascent as the canal boat gyrated in the canal, dancing on the currents. Flash occasionally twisted the rudder to get its stern in line. It was something they’d done hundreds of times.
As it neared the top, the currents eased off. The nose of their barge was still close to the towpath, close enough for her to jump.
Mersey checked to make sure the rope wasn’t tangled in anything, then hopped off the side of the barge and onto the towpath. There was already another barge waiting to enter—both Swanky and their towpony were leaning on the gate arms, forcing them open before the water could fully equalize.
While she started getting her barge underway, Swanky was spinning the paddle gates shut again. When they were in place, he waited for the barge to come to him, then jumped aboard.
After the first set of locks, Swanky would be napping in the cabin and she’d be in charge of the gates and valves, hitching and unhitching as needed. For these, she had nothing to do but wait.
•••
There was a time when the towpath through the forest had made her nervous. The ponies who had built the canal had considered the obvious advantages of a straight route versus the practicality of the actual terrain in front of their muzzles and made the best compromises they could; the route was mostly a series of broad, sweeping curves—much like the natural course of a river—with occasional straight sections where they had to cut through hills or build over low spots.
More to the point, she couldn’t see all of it. Back home on the farm, she could see the boundaries of the fields, and could keep track of where she was when she and Swanky pulled plows or harrows. Even when the crops were high and they were working the cultivator, she always knew where she was and how far she had to go. On the towpath, there had been no way to know. It was a chaos of trees and bushes and vines and ferns and weeds and whatever else felt like growing, and when she’d started, she didn’t know how to keep track of it all, or what the landmarks were.
Now she did, and it was as familiar as any field. Just like Flash Lock knew the waters and how they acted upon the boat, she knew the forest and the path. She knew what stayed the same and what changed on every passage.
Her nostrils flared as she closed on the wrecked bridge. Nothing was left of it but the heavy stone abutments, and a pile of mossy stones which had once been the counterweight for the drawbridge. Flash had told her that bargees burned it down because it was in the way, and even now she could still faintly smell the fire. Whatever timber the flames hadn’t claimed, moss and decay had.
There was always a curious eddy in the water beneath the former bridge. It might have been something as prosaic as fallen timbers, or as exotic as now purposeless bridge spirits.
She tapped a hoof against a weatherworn foundation stone tumbled onto the path, as she always had, and continued on. The towrope tugged for an instant as the barge hit the eddy, and then it was free.
The land around the canal changed past the ruined toll bridge; now it was marshy. Sometimes in spring the towpath would be muddy and she’d have to keep her nose down to see the soft spots, to keep from tripping over somepony else’s shoeprints. It was not unlike the fields of home; the soil was always soft when they tilled it in the spring.
Sometimes gravel got dumped in the worst spots. Sometimes it was properly graded and sometimes it wasn’t. Flash said that a few of the coal companies would occasionally tow a barge or two full of overburden down the canal and try to level off the path.
Keeping the towpath smooth was as important as keeping the water depth in the canal.
There wasn’t really any definite line between the forest and the marsh. In dry years, the forest extended further west; in wet years, it didn’t. Lots of dead trees still stood in the marshy water, their trunks and few remaining branches almost bone-white, victims of too much water, or too many nutrients in the soil.
Some sections of the canal that bridged low spots had earthen banks, and a few others were walled in with quarry stones, neatly stacked and almost watertight—they were always damp, and moss grew thick on the north-facing sides.
•••
Mersey slowed as they approached the Fens rail yard. A fully-loaded barge was tied to the dock; a sign on its stern said “West.” That was a load, maybe.
Flash saw it, too, and angled the barge across the canal. There wasn’t any oncoming traffic to worry about, and the towline was plenty long enough. Mersey had to shift her angle as the boat drifted across the canal; now the rope was pulling her rump sideways.
As Flash straightened, there would be a big pull and she’d hold her place, standing as a temporary anchor for the barge to pivot around, then she could start moving again once it had established itself along the opposite bank.
Once the barge was on its new course, Flash put her hooves to her lip and whistled; even though Mersey knew it was coming, she flinched. It was almost as loud as the steam locomotives that shouted in the rail yard.
When she’d first started pulling the barge, the yard didn’t come so close to the canal. The dock had been there, but there had been a screen of trees that dampened down all the sounds of the trains; now she had no choice but to look at the ranks of railroad cars that were going to put her out of a job someday.
She tried not to think about that too much, tried not to consider how every year she’d been towing the barge, the towpaths and the canal had gotten a little worse, a little less maintained. They’d towed some of the loads that helped the railroad expand, dropping them off at this very dock–the railroad didn’t have an efficient way to get the timbers it needed for bridges. Yet. All too soon that would come; the railroad was quickly expanding to reach new markets, faster than anypony could dig a canal there. The fact that they could get away with shoddy wooden trestles for a train to crawl across instead of a proper stone bridge like the canal used was insulting.
A pony poked his head over the rail yard embankment, then trotted down the ramp to the dock. Mersey knew him; he was one of the two ponies who ran the barge operation at Fens Yard.
•••
Stopping and starting was hard; keeping the barge moving wasn’t all that difficult. The canal had no current to speak of, and once it got moving the barge wanted to keep moving. The only times she felt she really had to work was when they were locking through; for the rest of the journey it was easier than pulling a plow.
When she was a greenhoof on the canals, she hadn’t appreciated Flash’s skills at boat handling, but now that she was wise and experienced, she did. The helmsmares on some barges constantly crashed into the banks, or made unnecessary stops and turns, and their towponies had to work harder to get the barge through. The colliers were the worst offenders; it was anypony’s guess about where one of their barges was going to go. She’d seen one of them crash headlong into an opposing boat at Oakton, and she’d overheard plenty of grumbling from their towponies.
Flash never seemed to make a mistake or a miscalculation. There had been a few times when she was first learning that things hadn’t gone as well as they should have, but it had never been Flash’s fault.
“Hoy, Mersey, new barge.”
She flicked her tail; she’d already knew.
“Through to Stroudwater.”
That was unusual; railroad barges usually got left in Oakton. More work for her, and more for Swanky in the afternoon . . . maybe they could pull together.
She missed that from the fields. Taking turns made sense, and having an extra pony on the boat to handle lines or lock gates or whatever was needed was more efficient than having two ponies in tandem on the towpath, but it was always nicer to have her brother at her side.
Most of the time, she didn’t really need to look back at the barge. She and Flash were a good team who didn’t need to know what the other was doing. She could see the other barges on the canal, or the set of the lock gates, and knew what Flash would do. A new barge was tricky. She estimated its weight compared to theirs, glanced back to make sure that the railpony had cast off all the lines, and again to see that Flash had looped her towrope around its bow bollard.
And she kept her eyes back as the rope went taut, as the jerk went through her harness, even though she’d stopped and braced herself. Ropes were springy, and hooking up to the previously stationary barge had recoil.
Then the barge was following along. Flash waited until it was moving and then started to pull in the towline. Some ponies liked to keep their towline long, but that required a second pony to steer the trailing barge; Flash liked to pull them tight so she could steer both of them from her barge.
It was heavier than she’d expected. Not unmanageable, but she was going to be working hard for the rest of the morning. They probably wouldn’t be able to coast through Oakton.
That was a problem for later.
A freight train rushed by on the other side of the canal, the engineer whistling out her warning. Mersey snorted at it and dug her hooves in, feeling the odd syncopated double tug of the pair of barges through her harness. For now, at least, they could still haul cargo where the train couldn’t.
•••
Mersey’s stomach was grumbling by the time they got to the bridge basin. This was routine; her tummy knew this was where they’d have lunch, one side or the other. Judging by the Manehattan-bound traffic, it would be lunch before the bridge today.
Delays always frustrated her, but she’d learned this was a good one. It was a natural midpoint on the journey, and it was where the upbound and downbound canal traffic most often intersected. They could stop and get lunch, let a bunch of downbound traffic pass, and have a clearer canal on the rest of their trip, which meant less competition for locks and sometimes an easier passage through Oakton and Lock Lake.
They settled in along the bank, fifth in a line of upbound barges. She could see all the way across, see all the Manehattan-bound traffic on the bridge and queued up on the other side, almost all the way to the end of their basin. A glance back at two more upbound barges behind them, one all the way back at the turn in the canal–they’d wait for that to come up.
Everypony knew the routine, knew how it was supposed to work. The food boats knew; as soon as Flash had tied them off, the food boat bumped up against their gunnel, and as they passed Flash and Swanky’s food onto deck, Swanky himself came out of the cabin, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
A pegasus filly landed on the towpath in front of her, setting down a paper sack of porridge, then flew off again, back to the food boat.
Sometimes she’d eat on the barge. It was tied up, she didn’t have to stay on the towpath. She didn’t even have to drop the towrope if she didn’t want to, as long as she was careful to not snag it on the cabins or railings.
There were mixed feelings on the etiquette when it came to eating on the towpath. Most experienced towponies preferred being ready to pull, because you never knew when one of the waiting barges on the other side might have a problem, and the bridge would open to the upbound side early, and then everypony else would be mad if you weren’t ready to go.
That had only happened to her once, back in her first season of towing. She’d gotten the barge moving fast enough to not cause a delay, but had had to sacrifice most of her lunch as a result. Swanky had kept it for her, but as much as she hated wasting food, she just couldn’t eat cold porridge.
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Cold porridge, mix with honey, allow to set, Eat it as Trailmix Granola bar?
That was a good story so far goodluck with the rest of it.
About what are the distances between locations in this fic? How far is she having to tow each day?
I doubt the railroad will ever put barge ponies completely out of business. Being able to float stuff will always be more energy-efficient on some paths.
11724361
Or use it as mortar if something needs patching
I don't know if porridge or oatmeal can be eaten cold; it goes from pleasant to gluey to fully-set in reasonably short order.
11724897
Thank you!
11724911
It's not really specific in the fic, 'cause I didn't previously crunch the numbers. Some interneting revealed that back in the day, canal barges averaged 1-2 mph (2-5km/h), and made 30-40 miles (50-64km) a day (a day being 24 hours); obviously, how much traffic there was and how many locks you had to deal with would affect the average. Mules and horses walk at 3-4 mph (5-6.5 km/h) and that's probably about the same speed ponies walk at, give or take. A barge would slow that some, obviously, but I think locks would be the bigger restriction.
Thus, if I had to put a number on the distance of their journey, I'd say that the distance between their terminal at Manehattan and their terminal at Stroudwater is probably 30 miles (50km) at most, figuring 14 hours at an average pace of just over 2mph (5km/h).
Where I live, towns are generally six to seven miles apart, about as far as a horse can travel there and back with a wagon in a day. Probably half of them are now gone, since we don't use horses any more and there's no purpose to having towns so close; for a lot of them, there's only a church and/or a cemetery left, and maybe a few houses in what used to be a town.
Yeah--a semi-recent example from near where I used to live: back in the 1800s the Canadian National (or their predecessor) built a tunnel under the St. Claire River since that was cheaper than building a bridge. As railroad cars got bigger, ferries carried the ones that wouldn't fit in the tunnel over the river.
They kept the ferries until 1995, when a newer, bigger tunnel was constructed. Longer railroad routes or the delay of switching cars onto the ferry and then back off were more cost-effective than digging a new tunnel.
While it doesn't come up in this story, obstacles like Lock Lake would be insurmountable to the railroad (at least, at a reasonable cost) but they're somewhere that the barges can go easily . . . and of course there would be some places where the canals were already dug, and so it would be cheaper to keep the canal than replace it with a railroad.
That having been said, if Equestria goes on the same technological path as Earth, the traditional canal like in this story will eventually be replaced by rails or trucks, and the 'canals' that are left will be the ones for big ships or for largely recreational use.
11725639
You just came across the beginning of an algorithm for fractally CityPlanning:
Farmers need goods and services from towns and goods and services have to movie between towns. Farmers want to go to town, do their business, and get back home in a day. People with business in other towns want to go to the next town, do their business and get home in a day. One starts by placing towns on an HexGrid. Each town contains a double-digit number of families numbering over 100 individuals, supporting a similar number of farming families.
Some goods and services require more customers and workers; so now, one lays down a bigger HexGrid, so that the center town is twice as populous. One continues to zoom outwards, with larger HexGrids, until we have cities with a population of millions.
This works for biog flat plains but does not explain New York City or why Chicago Illinois is many times larger than Gary Indiana:
We need to get things in and out of the country. In the 19th Century, we built the Eery Canal between the Hudson river and Lake Eery. We also built canal connecting the Great Lakes to each other (the Great Lakes have natural obstructions such as Niagara Falls). We connected Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River at Chicago through the Chicago Canal. New York City is a port connecting the Atlantic Ocean to ½ the area and ⅔rds the population of the USA and Canada. Chicago is a port connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi; while, Gary is not.
11728297
More of a square grid 'cause that's how we roll in the flatlands, but yeah, that's basically it. Using my town as a centerpoint, there are eight towns that I know of in a seven mile radius; except for the ones that had a railroad, most of them are now ghost towns.
For Chicago, it wasn't just the river connection (although that helped a lot), but that it was the easiest port to connect to for grain traffic and for cattle, which also caused a large number of railroads to terminate in Chicago, thus giving even more options for where goods could travel cheaply and quickly, which also attracted more railroads, as well as companies who wanted to ship their goods nationwide, and it kept growing in that manner.
I'm not sure if the canal or the railroads were more important to its growth, but that it was a port city that connected to the ocean (eventually), all the inland lakes, and linked more and more of the east and west as the rail networks expanded put it in a really good spot for growth.
Gary was never intended to be anything other than a company town, which reflects in both its rise and its fall.
I love the old canals and rivers; i love the old railways, and i love where they intersect or run side by side. Maybe that's the effect of growing up in Manchester, where rail was born and first met the water, but it is hard sometimes to love them both together. It was tragic what happened to towhorses and raftmen - 12000 year old professions lost to some forged iron.
No matter though, both still beat cars and lorries.
(Random side note
11732512
- but yes! hex grid of town on town, one days horse ride away. That's how it is in Europe - although most of the old villages have died off now.)
11808578
I've always been more of a railfan, but I can appreciate the engineering of the canals and the men who worked them. As I'm sure you know, the US didn't really get around to organizing big infrastructure projects until the waning days of canals and the early days of railroads, so for much of the nation there wasn't any impetus to create canals since it was way cheaper to just build a railroad.
That having been said, I've lived nearly all my life in Michigan, so while we didn't build very many canals of any significant distance, we have always had a fantastic way to ship bulk products . . . which of course comes with its own challenges; I can't imagine that there was ever a storm on the canals that sank over a dozen ships and killed several hundred men. And while of course shipping on the Great Lakes has changed over the centuries, we're still operating boats from the 40s.
Not if you're in a hurry, but I do take your point
I can count probably a half-dozen towns in a twenty-mile radius of me that are nothing more than a road sign or a cemetery or church, maybe a couple houses that are grouped more closely together than the rest on that road.