If you want to see any frieght carried in LONDON go to Battlebridge Basin, not a 100 yds from the London Canal Museum, for the last 10 weeks and for the next 12 weeks we have had a Leeds & Liverpool short boat, 2 Dutch barges and a Bantam Tug Scouser moving a Vast tonnage of steel and concrete to the new York Place site on the Regents Canal near Kings Cross. ----- Original Message ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 9:50 PM Subject: Re: [canals-list] Re: Any Freight Boats spotted this year on Englands Canals?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > "If you're asking why they stll exist today - because despite their=20 > small size and general lack of modernisation, they survived as cargo- > carriers for just long enough that most of them were still usable=20 > when it was first realised (initially only by a very few=20 > visionaries) that they could have a future as leisure boating=20 > routes." > Ok then why are they funded out of the AGraculture budget? Only way=20 > I could see this is to bring fresh water to farm lands in a country=20 > that is surounded by salt water? They aren't funded out of the agriculture budget - they have been lumped together with various other things in a department called DEFRA - the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs. Waterways don't easily fit into any department - they have tourist, heritage, regeneration, transport and various other aspects to them. Agriculture is the largest part of DEFRA, so unfortunately when an agriculture issue gets into a mess (as with the farm subsidies fiasco) it hits other parts of DEFRA too - even though they aren't really related to agriculture at all. It may seem crazy, but that's the situation at the moment. Martin L [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
