Ashton Boatman

Once upon a time Lancashire was packed with cotton mills. Each one had a huge steam engine to drive the looms via cotton ropes and line shafting. One of the main traffics of the Ashton canal was short distance runs of coal from local pits to feed the boilers of the mills that lined it's banks. Tropical plants grew in the water because of the amount of hot water flowing out of the mills. 

In the 1950s and 60s, one by one, they closed down.  Amazingly, in the deepest Lancashire village of Haslingden one survived in production, steam powered, up until 1979. The engine and one of the weaving sheds are still there and are being restored and developed as a museum. Yesterday I paid it a visit. The weaving shed wasn't open but I got to see the magnificent mil engine and the exhibition of bikes, cars and smaller steam and internal combustion engines .It's not a highly polished professionally presented museum but a reflection of the volunteer's love of old engineering. I rather like that. It's only open once a month, but well worth a visit.  Here's some pictures.

I was flipping through an old copy of Waterways World and I came across this. When I left the boat museum in 1982 I vowed I would not return by boat until I could do so with one that was carrying a load. The following year I was able to do that, though I recall that getting there for Easter involved crossing the Mersey in conditions that were less than comfortable. Amazingly, 37 years later, the grain run is still going, using a bigger barge and unloading at Runcorn rather than Frodsham. The grain then goes by road to Nelstrops mill in Stockport (terminus of the sadly filled in Stockport branch of the Ashton canal). It works because the dock charges in Liverpool for overside transhipment ( ie ship to ship rather than ship to lorry) are so much less. It also saves a lot of carbon emissions and urban pollution by shortening the lorry journeys.

This is in sad contrast to most inland waterway carrying. In those days the Weaver was busy with soda ash traffic. On the same page is an article about the Sheffield & South Yorkshire improvements, which turned out to be too little too late. On the news today I heard about the start of construction work on HS2. 20 years ago I'd have been all in favour of this. Railways are good, but in an overheating world do we really need to release all that carbon just to be able to go faster. Much better to invest in a network of new waterways with electric bank haulage so that we can move freight with minimal emissions.