It is nice to know that at least one politician has spotted the most important issue affecting Waterways Ireland. Here’s what the minister told him about the 85% of WI’s current budget that comes from her department:
Funding allocated to Waterways Ireland 2011-2014
Year €m
2011 €30.300m
2012 €27.099m
2013 €25.463m
2014 €24.183m
Now, Willie, ask her how much of each year’s allocation is gobbled up by pensions.
Posted in Canals, Economic activities, Extant waterways, Ireland, Irish waterways general, Operations, People, Politics, Restoration and rebuilding, Sources, waterways, Waterways management
Tagged budget, canal, department of arts heritage and the gaeltacht, Ireland, labour, Operations, Royal Canal, waterways, Waterways Ireland, Willie Penrose
On 26 November 2012 I noted that
The Royal Canal water supply applications have been approved by An Bord Pleanala. There were two separate applications […] but they were in effect treated as one.
There were conditions attached, but I concluded that
If I remember correctly, the amount of water available from Lough Ennell will not always provide enough (eg in a dry season) to keep the canal full. Still, this is a significant advance for Waterways Ireland and for Royal Canal enthusiasts.
So here we are, almost two years later, and the work of providing a supply from Lough Ennell to the Royal Canal, reckoned to be about a five-month job, has doubtless been long completed, no?
No.
The work has not yet started and Waterways Ireland will be lucky if it gets done within the next year.
As I understand it — and if, Gentle Reader, you have more information, do please leave a Comment below (your name can be kept out of public view if you like) — there are three sources of delay:
Irish Water has published its proposed Capital Investment Programme [PDF] but Appendix 1, the Investment Plan Project Summary, is in a separate file [PDF]. Category B is headed Review Scope and Commence Construction and it includes
Mullingar Regional Water Supply Scheme (G) … Lough Ennell Abstraction.
I can’t work out what “(G)” means. A few items are so marked; a few others are marked “(H)”; most items have neither.
The Capital Investment Programme [CIP] document says:
The CIP is dominated by contractual commitments entered into previously by Local Authorities, and which have now transitioned to Irish Water. In the 2014-2016 period, Irish Water will fund these contracts to completion and bring forward programmes and prioritised projects to commence. At the same time, it will progress a large portfolio of projects that are at the planning and design stage, reviewing their scope, budgets and, where appropriate, timing to favour maximising the performance of the existing assets through intensified capital maintenance that might allow deferral of major capital investment.
Emphasis mine. So that raises the possibility that Irish Water will decide not to fund the abstraction scheme but will rather opt to pay for continued pumping.
It is, of course, quite possible that I have misunderstood these difficult matters, so I will be glad to hear from anyone with better information.
Incidentally, reviewing Irish Water’s documents suggests to me that there are people there who know what they are doing and who have the expertise to manage large and complex operations. That differentiates them from the politicians in government and opposition, few of whom (as far as I can see) have any experience of running anything more complex than a parish social.
Posted in Built heritage, Canals, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Natural heritage, Non-waterway, Operations, People, Politics, Restoration and rebuilding, Sources, Tourism, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged bridge, Brosna, canal, Clonsingle, county council, department of arts heritage and the gaeltacht, floods, flow, Ireland, irish water, lock, Lough Ennell, Lough Owel, Mullingar, Operations, Royal Canal, water level, water supply, waterways, Waterways Ireland, weir, Westmeath
My attention was recently drawn to an article [PDF] by Mike Clarke about airholes.
The article is in Clogs and Gansey, the newsletter of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal Society, of which Mike is Founder and President. He is an extraordinarily knowledgeable person and it is well worth while looking around his website: for instance, there’s some material of Irish interest here, a list of publications here and material about the Leeds & Liverpool Canal here including a really excellent document about locks [PDF].
But back to the airholes.
Not being an engineer, or at all technically competent, I’m always reluctant to try explaining these mysteries, so I’ll welcome corrective Comments from any more technically-minded folk.
If the water level on the upstream side of a lock gate is higher than that on the lower, the gate will be difficult to open. If the gate is the tail gate [bottom or lower gate] of a lock, you can raise a rack [paddle] and allow water to flow from the upstream side, which is the chamber of the lock, to the downstream side, thus making a level and allowing the gate to be opened easily.
If the gate is the breast gate [head or upper gate] of a lock, the same applies: you can lift a rack [paddle] in the upper gate, allowing the excess water to flow into the lock chamber.
However, the relationship between the heights of the two gates (or pairs of gates) then becomes important: if the breast gates are higher than the tail gates, the water level in the lock chamber will not be able to reach the height of the water above the lock (at least until you’ve drained down the entire level [pound] back to the next lock upstream).
But for efficient operation, you want to reduce the amount of adjustment that has to be done after the boat reaches the lock but before it can enter the lock chamber. You want a system that is, as far as possible, automatically self-adjusting. That means, in particular, one that ensures that the level of water above the lock is not too high.
On many English canals, that is done by using byewashes.
Byewash on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal (E) at Marsden
As far as I know, though, few Irish canal locks have them, and I have heard British boaters comment on their absence. If memory serves, the canal (Leitrim) end of the Shannon–Erne Waterway does, but I have no suitable photo. I should confess that I have no idea what proportion of Irish and English canal locks are so equipped; I will be glad if anyone who can supply, or point to, the information will leave a Comment below.
Mike Clarke’s PDF article, to which I pointed at the top of this page, provides a possible explanation for the absence of byewashes on Irish canals. He says that airholes were used instead on canals “built or influenced” by William Jessop. Jessop worked on the Grand Canal as assistant to John Smeaton from 1773 and was consultant engineer to the Grand Canal Company until 1802 [Ruth Delany The Grand Canal of Ireland David & Charles, Newton Abbot 1973].
Mike Clarke also says that Jessop trained John Killaly: Killaly joined the Grand Canal Company in 1794 and became its engineer in 1798 [Delany op cit]; furthermore, his designs were used on the Royal Canal from Coolnahay to the Shannon [Ruth Delany and Ian Bath Ireland’s Royal Canal 1789–2009 The Lilliput Press, Dublin 2010].
If I’ve understood Mike Clarke’s article correctly, the airhole system uses the channel for the ground paddle [land rack] sluice instead of building a separate byewash channel. From his photograph, I gather that there is a separate letterbox-like slot in the recess for the rack mechanism: I presume that excess water flows in through the slot, falls to the level of the sluice or channel from there to the lock chamber and thus flows into the chamber. If the tail [lower] gates are left open, or with one rack [paddle] lifted, the water can then flow out into the lower level.
Is my understanding correct?
What proportion of locks on each Irish waterway are equipped with airholes?
Are they still maintained and used?
Land rack [ground paddle] outlet, Belmont Lock, Grand Canal
Ground paddle [land rack] outlet, Lock 43 Killashee, Royal Canal
Possible inlet, Lock 6, Royal Canal
The next three photos were taken at Coolnahay, on the Royal Canal, during the period of very low water levels in 2012.
Letterbox-like slot at Lock 26, Coolnahay, Royal Canal. I must look for similar features on Grand Canal locks and photograph them (if they exist)
A second slot forward of the first (hidden by the land rack mechanism in the previous photo)
Land rack mechanism locked slightly open: the slots were well above the water level at the time
It is of course entirely possible that all of this is so obvious that everybody else already knows all about it, but that I just didn’t understand what I was looking at. I read WI’s Heritage Survey of the Royal Canal [PDF], but it didn’t say anything about this sort of thing: or at least if it did I didn’t spot it. The report uses some non-standard terminology [eg “head gates”] so I may have missed its identification of the canal’s water-management features.
If, Gentle Reader, you know of the existence of papers or other published materials on these arcana, do please leave a Comment and, if possible, relevant links to online sources. It seems to me that there is a shortage of information about these technical matters as they apply to Irish waterways; it would also be nice if we were able to say which technologies were applied when to which waterways. I do not know whether, for example, we can assume that the lock gate designs in use today were always used on all Irish waterways.
Posted in Built heritage, Canals, Drainage, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Operations, People, Restoration and rebuilding, Sources, Uncategorized, waterways, Waterways management
Tagged airhole, bye-wash, byewash, Ireland, Jessop, Killaly, lock, Mike Clarke, Royal Canal, water level, waterways, Waterways Ireland
A new, short book, on aspects of the history of the Royal Canal, published by the Railway and Canal Historical Society, will be launched at the Clinker Lecture on 18 October 2014. The title is The Royal under the Railway: Ireland’s Royal Canal 1830–1899 and it covers a number of topics, mostly about the canal after it was bought by the Midland Great Western Railway. From the Introduction:
The accounts of the Midland Great Western Railway for the half year ending 31 December 1849, four years after it bought the Royal Canal, showed its gross income from the railway as £23,773 and its income from the canal as £7,677, roughly a quarter of the total. By 1899, though, income from the railway was £264,393 and that from the canal £2,220, less than one per cent of the total. The Royal Canal, never particularly successful, had declined into utter irrelevance.
It may seem perverse, therefore, to offer even a short book on the canal’s history in that period, especially as there exist two full histories, by Peter Clarke and by Ruth Delany (with Ian Bath in the most recent edition). This, though, is not a full history, even of the limited period, roughly 1830–1899, from just before the railway took over until the end of the nineteenth century. This is rather a complement to those histories, providing just enough background information to enable the book to stand alone while covering some new topics and providing new or extra information on others. The topics include:
- the 120-foot steam-powered narrowboat
- the Midland Great Western Railway’s early attempts at running canal boats
- the ingenious Mr Mallet’s moveable bridge
- the whore who held the mortgage on the canal
- the competition between the roads of Roscommon and the Royal Canal
- the reconstruction of Dublin bridges over the canal
- the horses who slept on board their boat.
[…] this book is not intended to be the last word on any of those topics. I hope that it might encourage others – those researching local, family, social, industrial, transport, economic or technological history – to record and transmit anything they might learn about the history of the Royal Canal. To take just three topics, we know very little about canal employees, the operations of canal traders or the management of the horse-drawn canal boats. On any one of those, useful information could just as easily be found by a local or family historian as by a canal specialist.
Posted in Ashore, Built heritage, Canals, Charles Wye Williams, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, People, Politics, Rail, Restoration and rebuilding, Sea, Shannon, Sources, Steamers, The cattle trade, waterways, Waterways management
Tagged boats, bridge, canal, Dublin, Grand Canal, Ireland, Limerick, lock, Lough Derg, Midland Great Western Railway, Operations, Royal Canal, Shannon, vessels, waterways
I am grateful to Waterways Ireland for letting me have the Shannon traffic figures for July 2014. All the usual caveats apply:
On the other hand, the figures do include the Shannon’s most significant tourism activity, the cruiser hire business. And they are our only consistent long-term indicator of usage of the inland waterways.
Total (private + hired) traffic for the first seven months of each year
Traffic in 2013 was up a bit on 2012; 2014 is down slightly below the 2012 level. It’s the lowest seven-month figure in the series (ie since 2003), which is a bit of a surprise: I thought that the good weather would encourage more boating.
The changes are small, so their importance must not be exaggerated, but they’re not cause for celebration. Let’s see whether the drop was amongst private or hired boats (or both).
Private-boat traffic for the first seven months of each year
Private traffic is up a bit on 2012 but down on 2013.
Hire-boat traffic for the first seven months of each year
Hire-boat traffic is down on both previous years, but the pace of decline seems to have slowed.
Changes since 2003: private and hired boats
Hire-boat traffic seems to be levelling off at 40% of its 2003 figure: a massive loss of business. I do not know whether anyone is trying to, or could, recover that amount of business. I am not aware of any new Shannon-based tourism business that could compensate for the losses in the cruising (hire-boat) business, but I would be glad to hear from anyone who knows of such projects. Something with high growth potential is required.
Private traffic is wobbling either side of its 2003 figure: the increases during the Celtic Tiger years have been lost.
Still roughly 50/50
In the year to July 2014, hire-boat traffic was just above private traffic, but there is very little in it. Private traffic is now comparatively more important to Waterways Ireland [which may be why it is now trying to establish its economic importance] but it does not bring in much money from outside the two jurisdictions, so the case for public spending on waterways becomes much weaker.
And, quite clearly, opening more waterways doesn’t work: as this chart showed last month, the branches off the main lines of the Shannon, Erne and SEW are little used. The Lough Allen Canal, the Suck and the navigation to Limerick are very little used and I see no sign that the reopened Royal Canal has attracted many visitors to Ireland. What is needed is more intensive usage of the main waterways, not further dilution by the opening of more branches [to Clones or anywhere else].
High and low usage
Finally, I thought it might be interesting to see whether the monthly pattern of usage has changed since 2003. To avoid an over-cluttered chart, I included only four years: 2003, 2003 +5, 2003 + 10 and 2014. The chart is for all boats, private and hired.
Monthly traffic, selected years
The season seems to have got going earlier in 2003 and even in 2008. Was the weather better in those years?
Posted in Canals, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Foreign parts, Forgotten navigations, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Operations, People, Politics, Restoration and rebuilding, Scenery, Shannon, Sources, Tourism, Ulster Canal, Unbuilt canals, Water sports activities, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged boats, bridge, canal, Clones, cruising, Erne, hire boats, IBRA, Ireland, Limerick, lock, Lough Allen, Operations, passages, private boats, Royal Canal, Shannon, Shannon-Erne Waterway, Suck, traffic, Ulster Canal, vessels, Waterways Ireland
Barrow Line 1
Barrow Line 2
Barrow Line 3
Barrow Line 4
When I get a moment, I must find out how many boats have been down that way in this warm, sunny July, the peak of the holiday season. The warmth will have encouraged the vegetation, but I suspect relatively few boats have been through. And only two boats entered the Royal through Dublin in July, even though two openings were offered.
Apart from giving artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative about the value of the canal tourist industry and the abiding love of boaters for the canal, using canals helps to keep the weed down.
Posted in Built heritage, Canals, Economic activities, Engineering and construction, Extant waterways, Industrial heritage, Ireland, Irish inland waterways vessels, Natural heritage, Operations, People, Politics, Tourism, waterways, Waterways management, Weather
Tagged barge, Barrow, Barrow Line, boats, bridge, canal, Dublin, Grand Canal, growth, Ireland, Operations, Royal Canal, traffic, waterways, Waterways Ireland, weed
Irish waterways history 