Ey up! Are we about to go back to the golden canal era of the 19/20th century where ‘Leggers’ were in great demand to get narrowboats laden with goods through tunnels. 
There are calls to encourage urban freight onto water & rail to decarbonise fossil fuel HGV’s in towns & cities & also improve road safety.
commercialfleet.org/news/la … ays-report
lancpudn:
Ey up! Are we about to go back to the golden canal era of the 19/20th century where ‘Leggers’ were in great demand to get narrowboats laden with goods through tunnels.
There are calls to encourage urban freight onto water & rail to decarbonise fossil fuel HGV’s in towns & cities & also improve road safety.
commercialfleet.org/news/la … ays-report
Ill volunteer to be a "legger", looks like a fine way to get fit. But being an older bloke, Ill just do the downhill bits.
They’ll still be playing the same old ‘carbon’ card in the case of EV or hydrogen fuelled trucks v boats and trains running on red diesel.
The truth is it’s an anti road transport country.
Franglais:
lancpudn:
Ey up! Are we about to go back to the golden canal era of the 19/20th century where ‘Leggers’ were in great demand to get narrowboats laden with goods through tunnels.
There are calls to encourage urban freight onto water & rail to decarbonise fossil fuel HGV’s in towns & cities & also improve road safety.
commercialfleet.org/news/la … ays-reportI
ll volunteer to be a "legger", looks like a fine way to get fit. But being an older bloke, Ill just do the downhill bits.
LOL I’m an old ■■■■ too with a dodgy back & a knackered arthritic knee the size of a football this time o year. 
I told some American tourists once that the boats used to be legged through the tunnels and when they asked what that meant I told them that they trained the horses to lay on their backs on the roof of the boats and walk upside-down. 
Harry Monk:
I told some American tourists once that the boats used to be legged through the tunnels and when they asked what that meant I told them that they trained the horses to lay on their backs on the roof of the boats and walk upside-down.
RSCT have been shunting boxes up the ship canal to Manchester for years. Great for your green credentials, but a right pain in the arse if you are in Warrington when they lift bridges to allow ships to pass, and you get caught in the ensuing gridlock.
Harry Monk:
I told some American tourists once that the boats used to be legged through the tunnels and when they asked what that meant I told them that they trained the horses to lay on their backs on the roof of the boats and walk upside-down.
Should have also told them it took years to raise the height of the tunnels from when they employed humans lying on their sides to do it.
Looks like the new world railways wont need a driver or a locomotive in the not too distant future for transporting containers! Autonomous electric Bogies that can travel 500 miles on one charge & able to carry 64 tons They can be made up into a train or individual units that break off from the train & go their separate ways to their destination. “The wheel units use a battery–electric Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM)”. electrive.com/2022/01/20/pa … nnovation/
Oh god,this again… the canals in this country were build between 1760 and 1810 (give or take a few years and one or two exceptions) to take twenty ton narrow boats, at the mind boggling speed of 4 to 6 mph. Factor in the delays at locks , and your down to an average speed of 2-3 mph. Those 20 tonne narrow boats were towed by horses (■■■■■■■■■ and methane), or diesel engines.
Even if you electrify the boats, they need large batteries, and charging unlike motor vehicles, you can’t park a boat on a convenient piece of waste land, it needs a lot of water to float. The canals do not have the capacity to do that.
That is of course, only for those canals still reasonably navigable. Many canals are now so badly maintained (both dredging and infrastructure maintenance), that commercial traffic is simply not possible.
Canal enthusiasts would love nothing more than getting commercial traffic back, but it us not going to happen.
As for City Centre deliveries by rail…
the nodding donkey:
Canal enthusiasts would love nothing more than getting commercial traffic back, but it us not going to happen.
I don’t think any narrowboater would welcome a large influx of commercial traffic jamming up the place.
In any event, other than short trips on very wide navigations using large vessels it just wouldn’t work. There’s a website called “Canalplan AC” which is like the AA route planner for boats. Here’s a trip from Paddington, London to central Liverpool.
“This is a trip of 298 miles, 4 furlongs and 180 locks from Paddington Basin Visitor Moorings to Salthouse Dock.
This will take 145 hours and 28 minutes which is 20 days, 5 hours and 28 minutes at 7 hours per day”.
It’s what, five hours in a truck?
In addition although there are broad canals in both the north and south, there is no north-south route available to boats over 7’ wide due to narrow sections in the midlands.
the nodding donkey:
Oh god,this again… the canals in this country were build between 1760 and 1810 (give or take a few years and one or two exceptions) to take twenty ton narrow boats, at the mind boggling speed of 4 to 6 mph. Factor in the delays at locks , and your down to an average speed of 2-3 mph. Those 20 tonne narrow boats were towed by horses ([zb] and methane), or diesel engines.
Even if you electrify the boats, they need large batteries, and charging unlike motor vehicles, you can’t park a boat on a convenient piece of waste land, it needs a lot of water to float. The canals do not have the capacity to do that.That is of course, only for those canals still reasonably navigable. Many canals are now so badly maintained (both dredging and infrastructure maintenance), that commercial traffic is simply not possible.
Canal enthusiasts would love nothing more than getting commercial traffic back, but it us not going to happen.
As for City Centre deliveries by rail…
LOL The environmental lawyers Clientearth are taking the UK government to court again over a lack of action over it’s Net Zero strategy so they have to keep trying to pull the wool over their eyes with these hair brain schemes.
clientearth.org/latest/late … er-webview