Some ponies say it's no skill to pull a canal barge, but Mersey knows better. Even algae on the bottom makes the barge pull differently than when it's clean, and its momentum can be a help or a hinderance, depending on the situation.
Locks, docks, and opposing traffic all need to be dealt with, as well as an extra barge in Fens Junction that's going all the way through to Stroudwater. If that wasn't enough, she's got to look after her brother and keep him out of trouble, both on the canal path and at the public house.
Chapters (5)
Mersey!
Ferry, 'cross the-
I could tell that this was one of your stories just as I reached the comma of your first line of the summary !
You have a style, my man.
Placed in the
Admiral Biscuit's Fleet (folder)
Every Day Pony Life On Equestria (folder)
Ooh, barge ponies!
Canals are very cool; it's a shame they are mostly obsolete for freight hauling these days.
Mersey has a good head on her shoulders, excited to see where you go with this one. Will be keeping my eyes on it.
Heavy canals with good builds.
Then again, whole range of variations. One towpath, towpath each side, loop bridges or just steps, tunnels with and without towpaths, and even one converted tunnel bridge with a removable floating towpath for those wider barges.
I always get excited for a multi-chapter Biscuit fic.
Woo-hoo! More Mersey!
(Love the new tag-line, by the way!
)
11723492
In Europe,* they're making a huge comeback for pleasure-boating! Many old, disused canals are being actively restored.
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* To be clear, I guess I've got to say Europe and Britain now, don't I?
11723784
We're still part of the same continent, just not part of the Union.
Socially, well there isn't really one European culture but we share some things and canals are / were one of them. Our network was completed just in time to become obsolete due to rail. The Manchester ship canal at least still gets some use, I went on a tour of it a few years ago, it was freezing at the time.
11723781
Have we seen Mersey before?
11723929
Must have, she's a big river in the North West. Hard to miss :P
11723890
Good point! And the culture thing I understand well, coming from a country of a dozen or so. Though weirdly, when Europeans tell American jokes, they always seem to do it with a Texan accent.
It's kind of amazing how efficient canals were compared to roads. But I guess that's the same factor at work that has all the old canals leading into London ending near train stations!
11723929
Unless I am hallucinating (which isn't all that improbable) wasn't she the pony who ran a canal barge in... one of the Admiral's HiE fics? Can't recall the title at the moment.
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And she eats oats
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Or canal barge, that works too
11723471
Thank you! Hopefully the story's living up to it so far
11723484
Thank you!
11723492
I love barge ponies. I can't remember who sent me a link to a traditional barge pony towing a traditional barge, but whoever it was we can both thank them.
Mostly, and certainly the traditional ones aren't very commercial these days, but there are of course larger canals for larger boats which are still in frequent use (except when an Evergreen ship gets stuck in them).
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I assume you are aware it's a reference to a song by Gerry and the Pacemakers.
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She does, she's a smart pony.
Thanks!
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Those are the best.
Oh yeah, there are a lot of variations, even on a single canal sometimes. Fitting in with what they had to work with when they built it, or a later improvement, or a case of funds ran out. . . .
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It's even more exciting when they update on a good schedule until they're finished, I'm not always so good at that.
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She's a great pony
Dunno why, but he's only ever reviewed one of my stories and that was years ago. I think he liked it, but apparently never looked further in the catalog.
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I think that there are some in the US which have been revitalized, at least in part, but not very many. I'm not entirely sure, though. There's apparently one in Michigan that's still in use for recreational boats (obviously, depending on how you define a canal, we've got some in Michigan that still see heavy use, like the Soo canal that leads to the Soo Locks (and the Welland Canal that bypasses Niagara Falls).
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I think that's the reason the US didn't have as huge a network of 'traditional' canals as Europe did. We built a bunch of them some of which were engineering marvels, but railroad technology was quickly catching up. Several of the canals in Michigan that got started only made it a few miles before railroad technology improved to the point that building a railroad was the superior choice. According to one source, the US had around 4,000 miles of canals.
There are of course some much larger ones that were never intended for canal boats but instead full-sized ships.
11723929
We sure have; she features in the Canal Boat chapters of Field Notes.
As 11723948 (who isn't hallucinating) remembered.
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That river is what inspired her name.
Flash Lock is named for a type of canal lock, and Swanky Brook is named after the Sankey Brook Navigation Company.
There'll be more canal facts and shipping company facts at the end of the story, in an attached blog post!
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I am, yes.
The titular ferry of the song runs between Liverpool, Birkenhead and Seacombe and as far as I know, that route is still in service.
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Lmao it's fine. These fics of yours always have the same vibe as those animes about cute girls doing hyperspecific things (except it's ponies). It's always super cozy to read after a long day. I'm sure we can all live with a schedule that fits you.
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His loss!
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Somebody (I won't name him 'cause I don't know if he wants to be named) said :I absolutely love how boring and mundane your Ponies on Earth stories are.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to read an epic adventure or a heartfelt romance or a terrifying horror story, but sometimes all we want is a nice calm story about ponies doing a Thing, and I'm happy to provide them. I like doing the research and learning about stuff, and I like thinking about the pony approach to it, and I love that people enjoy reading them.
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Ah excellent good old St Helens.
I actually served aboard the Stena Line ferries Lagan and Mersey before they were taken away and chopped up.
8 hours from Birkenhead to Belfast. Good Times. I lived on that river for some time, I owe the start of my career at sea to her.
Was pleasantly surprised to see this pop up
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It is indeed. And I approve of this story even more highly than I did before.
Cold porridge, mix with honey, allow to set, Eat it as Trailmix Granola bar?
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I was the one who sent you the link to that video :)
The coffee should be either acidic and sour of bitter and alkaline. Sour is acidic and bitter is alkaline. If Equestrian coffee is like ours, it should be bitter and alkaline:
The reason coffee is bitter is because it it has alkaloids. Alkaloids and organic compounds. The bitter taste comes from amine-groups -NH2. We dislike bitter much more than sour because many plants use alkaloids, such as caffeine, theobromine, et cetera for discouraging animals from eating them because many alkaloids are poisonous.
A good way to make coffee is with boiling water, but after brewing, one should not boil the coffee because that eliminates nice smelling and tasting volatile compound, thus leaving just the bitter alkaloids like caffeine. This is called burning the coffee. Coffee also looses volatile compounds over time, such is why old coffee taste bad.
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.
is Mersey mute? I dont recall I single moment where she spoke.
This, as always, has been a fascinating read.
Mersy is pulling a jordan, or am I just in de Nile?
So much canal traffic where I used to live, so little work, still so much confusion.
Bingly 5 rise gets all the advertising, but its the previous lot that gets all the time. Bingly 12. Though I forgot if its a hard staircase or stretches or even large side pond moorings. Village I origonally lived in just missed out on one of the more spectacular feats of canal engineering, Balanced Funicular canal railway. A mile long to the north, and over 2 mile long to the south. Eventually only the railway reemained built and at 1 in 33 at the bottom of the hill, even the funicular wouldve been tilted. They might have planned to cut deeper into the hill up the valley before putting in a shorter steeper tankage unit. All depends on how much fdiffrent works cost and what they wanted to pay for?
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I only just noticed that in this chapter as well.
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Ooh a career at sea! That sounds fun. I don't fully trust the ocean, but sometimes I think it would be fun to work on the Lake Freighters here in Michigan.
Just this summer I took a traditional ferry across Lake Michigan to Wisconsin--the Badger, a retired railroad carferry, and I think she's the last revenue coal-fired ship on the Great Lakes.
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Thank you again!
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More coffee facts than I ever knew!
I suppose Mersey's description isn't entirely accurate, but then she's a former farmpony now a bargepony, rather than a food critic or chemist.
Also now I'm wondering 'cause I don't know, how different are horse taste buds than ours, and what flavors are they naturally drawn to?
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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.
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Thank you!
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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.
11725134
Yes, she is.
Thank you!