billh

If it's just overnight, I would think mooring at the top of lock5 on the towpath outside the tennis venue should be ok. The Ashton Canal , particularly in this area is somewhat gentrified these days, long gone are the vandals,they tend to stay at home fiddling on their "devices". I was going to say the Co-Op venue is but a stone's throw from the suggested mooring😄

The tanks in the C & C boats looked very similar in size to the ones in their road tanker fleet in the 50s and 60s .Scammel tractor units with quite small trailers. Which came first,tanks in boats or tanks on the road?

Continuing the stop plank discussion, I remember in 1969 , canal carpenter, Ben Wagstaffe knocked up a set of stop planks in about half a hour. He cut them to length with a hand saw, bevelled the ends very neatly with an adze and nailed the metal handles on . We had them fitted (in a drained lock )within an hour.

A stone cill was provided in the bottom of the canal, to seat the first stop plank. In later years this cill often got covered in debris preventing the plank from sitting down . This problem was partly solved by leaving the bottom plank in place permanently , which is ok until a deep boat , combined with a low water level gets stuck on the plank or even destroys it! DAMHIK. There is a special tool for cleaning the stop plank grooves- a stout wooden pole with a squared off metal clad spade shaped tip , the same width as a stop plank.

The Clayton Aniline Company , next to the Ashton Canal had a fireless loco, using steam from their own large boiler house. There was a quite extensive railway system within the works with , eventually, two independant mainline railway connections (LMS and LNER). By the 1970s the Company were drawing a million gallons a day from the canal which was not returned .A good earner for British Waterways at the time. All gone now, part of the Etihad football enterprise.😞

I've taken a 70ft boat into the top lock of the Huddersfield Broad, didn't go down though. 😃. ISTR we had to reverse back to the incinerator to turn as Patrick says. Part of a trip from Ashton to Huddersfield and return twenty odd years ago.

The first LNER maintainance motor boat Joel, was a conversion from a wooden horseboat in 1927: https://collections.canalrivertrust.org.uk/bw192.3.1.31.1.10 The various pictures of Joel in the 1930s show its origins very clearly. The engine was a Kelvin E2 petrol/paraffin engine of 9HP. The boat was scrapped in 1948, as "worn out" and replaced by the present wooden motor taking the same name. ETA: the later Joel was also a conversion from a horseboat possibly Emma no 9 in 1948.

Yes, I know all that. I was pointing out that the railway shunter's pole transferred to a canal use and could also be used as a brake stick, probably with a short life in that application😄 I can see how my original post could be misunderstood,sorry.

The canal to railway use works the other way as well: Shunter's pole, for coupling wagons ( and applying brakes as shown) makes an ideal tool for decluttering props on boats without a new-fangled weed hatch.

A bit of a side issue , if I may ask? We have an A 127 alternator on a slow running engine, V belt running on the flywheel rim, no groove. The alternator runs opposite direction to "normal", that is anti-clockwise looked at from the pulley end and works ok if a little hot at times. I have yet to find the correct rotation fan for this, any ideas for a source? The power demands of the boat are quite modest.

Edith was motorized in 1927, as you say this was before the Kelvin diesels were in production. Kelvins that were available at that time included the new models E, F and G paraffin engines . It occurs to me that possibly 2 x model F4 or 2 x G2 , at about 30 HP each may have been installed? Examples of 2x F4s were in passenger boats on the Thames and the mail boat on Loch Lomond still has them as far as I know. As soon as the K diesels came along they would have offered much better fuel economy but cost of new engines would be a big consideration. Are we sure that a diesel was installed? I cant see some kind of chain drive working reliably with all that torque from a K. How about a hydraulic drive, one pump on the engine, 2 motors for the props? Hydraulics became "a thing" after the its rapid development for aircraft in WW2. And you could put one prop in forward and one in reverse for a sharp turn!

Aye, there's one at Marple right now, Lock 7, probably others on the flight in the near future😟

A very interesting chap. He gave a talk that I attended a couple of years ago, he started as a truck driver for a haulage firm and built up the Manchester Cabins firm later. Have a look at his steam powered Land Rover and interesting things in his garden! A worthy successor to Fred Dibnah with an infectious laugh😃

The railway certainly were in charge of the canal up until nationalisation, the canal staff were answerable to the District Engineer at Guide Bridge Station, I have several items of correspondence between the Canal Inspector (George Lucas) and the DE. The electrification of the route between Guide Bridge and Stalybridge is set to go live (25kV AC) in a month's time. All the gantries on the main line next to the picture have been replaced with new, the original DC wiring only reached Dukinfield Central Station providing a head shunt for the Brookside sidings.The siding alongside the towpath gave rail access to the Prince's Dock about 200 yards away. The last use of this dock was loading 12 tons of coal into NB Joel for distribution to the various lock keepers then resident on the canal.