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Passing Place in a Lock


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1 hour ago, magpie patrick said:

IRegarding the bit in bold, was the Canal du Midi a commercial entity? I appreciate our promoters under-estimated demand but I find it difficult to believe that there would be a return on capital with boats only moving every other day!

A river navigation might be different of course, as creating the navigation potential has a much lower spend per kilometre

It does seem to have been the case, and the same thing may have happened on the Canal de Briare. They had their own 'caves' for storing wine until the winter rains provided enough water for the trip to Paris. Probably a bit of a simplification, but water supply was not well understood in the 18th century. France had some early canals, the Briare, Midi, Orleans, and Picardy, but the return was obviously poor. There was much more centralised control by the government, which affected canal development there, though there were some grand schemes. Both Austria and France looked at English narrow canals as a way of producing a cheap navigational system after the Napoleonic wars, but little in the way of narrow canals were built, apart from the Canal du Berry, Wiener Neustadt Canal and the Naab Navigation in Bavaria, plus I think a canal in the Low Countries.

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