On our way with tarboat Spey
Jonathan Mosse continues his monthly look at freight developments on the inland waterways.
BRIEF spells between setting locks for the 1937 wooden tar carrier nb Spey – on her 13-day dash between Manchester and London – gave me periods of time for reflection on canal carrying past and present. The speakers at the Commercial Boat Operators Association’s (CBOA) AGM offered me (to a greater or lesser extent) some flesh to put on the bones of those thoughts.
First off a double act by Canal & River
Trust chief executive Richard Parry and North East regional director Sean McGinley. In essence this amounted to an acknowledgment – tacit or otherwise – that all the shortcomings that CBOA members had identified with the inland waterways system, from the point of view of commercial carrying over the past 25 years or so are, in fact, a reality!
Generalisations are, I recognise, dangerous beasts to court but if I was looking for a single word to describe that CRT round-up I would, without hesitation, choose ‘reactive’. Although it would probably be unreasonable to expect CRT to have anticipated the breach near Goole, which closed the Aire & Calder Navigation to all traffic for nine months, shortly after the hard-won aggregate traffic restarted following an enforced seven-year lay-off.
So, what might a proactive CRT look like in the context of carrying by water? A random glance could include maintaining the track and having an understanding of some of the basic fluid dynamics that ensures the smooth passage of a vessel through the water. The sort of things, in fact, that contribute to the efficient use of a laden barge navigating an inland waterway, consuming the minimum amount of fuel possible.
This was the thrust of Dr Momchil Terziev’s presentation in which he laid out his £3.8 million project, investigating channel dimensions, hull design, dredging and an imaginative range of ramifications thereon.
What clearly baffled him lay in the fact that here he was, designing a project for which he then had to seek funding, rather than CRT beating a path to his door, anxious to develop a deeper understanding of their primary asset against the backdrop of a climate emergency.
For one, constantly dragging the bottom consumes excessive additional fuel, increasing emissions and thereby contributing unnecessarily to global warming. Also, the cumulative damage sustained by the hull is not inconsiderable either.
The third speaker, Dr Chris Poole, no stranger to boating Britain’s inland waterways, focused on the less tangible benefits of waterborne transport, embracing areas of health and wellbeing alongside a methodology to quantify same, one that seems to have more or less fallen into abeyance at the hands of CRT. This is an area that deserves (and I feel sure will receive) further investigation.
Chiming closely with my Spey meditations was a rhetorical question from the floor which transported us swiftly from the North East navigations to those of the South East. How long, the questioner pondered, would it be before the Grand Union was dredged to 6ft to enable it to transport containers economically from London to Birmingham?
Received wisdom suggested that it would be dependent on the ‘cost of carbon’ and the breakeven point probably lay around 10 years hence.
On my recent travels along the Grand Union, prompted by the very visible evidence of the 1930s make-work scheme that upgraded the navigation from a narrow to a broad canal, I fell to reflecting that if this could happen on the GU, there was no reason why in the 21st century it couldn’t happen on other waterways.
But returning directly to tarboat Spey, what else has she to offer 21st century freight transport on the inland waterways? Well, apart from being the somewhat unexpected womb for my recent meditations, it will not have escaped the notice of the eagle-eyed that her 1937 Bolinder semi-diesel engine was fuelled by hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) throughout her 200-mile dash.
This 90% carbon neutral fuel made the engine perform better than ever before, as detailed in this associated press release from fuel and lubricants company Crown Oil: www.crownoil. co.uk/news/an-english-heritage-boatthe-showpiece-for-100-renewable-hvofuel/
Recent IWA trials have demonstrated that it is suitable for all diesel engines found in boats across the inland waterways system and they are delighted to discover that heritage engines are no exception.
So, in commercial carrying not only do we see a massive contribution to achieving net zero by using just 25% of the fuel of the lorry equivalent, we also have the very real opportunity to further moderate our environmental impact by using an almost carbon neutral fuel. Honestly, what is there not to like in this potentially win-win scenario?