On Sunday, January 07, 2007 1:26 AM [GMT+1=CET], trainfinder22 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> One barge hold about 15 railroad cars worth of freight...thats about > 10,000 dollers of revenue. At the avarage hourly rate that labors > get paid and the high cost of petro can a barge or string of them > travel across great britain and break even? The beginning of that paragraph actually holds the answer to the question you ask at the end. While we've got about 2.5k miles of navugable inland waterways, they are *much* smaller than the ones you're talking about in the USA. The whole of our midlands system, including *all* the through routes from north to south was built to a gauge decided in the 1760s. It will only take narrowboats, whose maximum load is about 25 tons. And there are a lot of small locks rather than a few big ones. At that size the economics of the thing are pretty unhelpful. There are bigger, wider routes, but they're still a lot smaller than the commercial routes in mainloand Europe and the USA. Why don't we enlarge our waterways to an economically viable scale? Here we hit another crucial difference between the UK and the USA. We are a small island with a big population. Those parts of the UK that generate trade are, on the whole *very* crowded by US standards. This makes land very expensive, and the cost of the land acquisition needed for such an enlargement process is pretty unthinkable. So why didn't we do the enlargement incrementally over the second half of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth as was done in much of mainland Europe? The answer lies in the differing history of the waterways in the various countries. In France, for example, many of the waterways were built initially by the State (beginning with Louis VIV), so when the railways came along and started competing, the State had an economic interest in modernising its waterways to make them competitive. In the UK all the waterways (with a very few minor exceptions) were built by private entrepreneurs. This meant that when the railways came, the fashion for investment swung from waterways to railways and there were very few investors interested in modernising the waterways. The Governments of the period didn't have any economic stake in the system, and didn't see the matter as any of their business. Mike Stevens narrowboat Felis Catus III web-site www.mike-stevens.co.uk Defend the waterways. Visit the web site www.saveourwaterways.org.uk
