The Brilliant Engineering and Beauty of the Llangollen Canal
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- Опубліковано 21 лип 2018
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The Llangollen canal spans England and Wales and is truly one of the waterway treasure of the UK. Not only beautiful, it boasts some amazing engineering feats of the 1790s. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, you can navigate this linear industrial history museum and travel back in time yourself!
Music: The Zepplin by Blue Dot Sessions
Licensed under Creative Commons - Наука та технологія
And that's partially how the railways were born:
The North East of England has huge coal reserves and industry throughout the country needed fuel badly. The North East for some reason never connected with the rest of the countrys canal system and mine engineers needed an answer - to shift coal more quickly..
There are large rivers in the coal mining area but many mines were several mines from them. Get coal to a waiting boat/ship and it can be in London two weeks later.
The early railways back then were made using wooden rails. Those rails were flat with a vertical wooden buffer to prevent wheels falling off. The coal wagons were hauled using horses and sometimes gravity to the rivers edge did the rest.
Wooden rails rot and wear out. Coal wagons could be quite heavy (more coal more money) and horses could only pull so much.
Iron was tried. It worked a treat and although brittle (new ones could be dropped into place) they did go some way to removing the resistive loads that wooden rails had. Mining was growing rapidly though and so was the demand for coal. Mine engineers knew of, and had experience of, water pumping steam engines. Some clever engineers (Stephenson for example) set to trying to mobilise those steam engines. Other engines were stationary and would pull coal wagons along some stretches.
I think we know the rest!
I live in the North East of England. Even now you can still see the signs of where those old early horse drawn wagonways were. Other early steam hauled wagonways are either bridleways or upgraded further to currently used railways.
If you ever visit the UK again I can highly recommend visiting some of the museums located in and around the city of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Your videos are awesome by the way :)
Those horse drawn locations should be unesco heritage sites
Your content is incredible
*Isn't this guy TALENTED!?? I LOVE this channel*
太美了
Love how the walking old ladies go faster than the boat XD
Lol, I noticed that too. But I guess leisure and pleasure was the purpose of this trip.
Jume Mowery boats aren’t there for going fast - they’re there to carry vast amounts of cargo. A single narrowboat would carry 50 tons of coal to Newcastle. And it would of course keep going a lot longer than those walking ladies. The Dutch equivalent, the Trekschuit, was drawn by a horse. It carried human passengers as well as cargo - passengers who were happy to spend significant currency in order to *not* have to walk.
@@JasperJanssen Coal to newcastle? Is the return trip a pile of salt to Cheshire?
But can the old lady carry a couple of tons of cargo?
Max Speed for any user of these waterways in the UK is 4 knots, or less than any noticeable bow wave, which is reasonably easily surpassed by many people on foot
I passionately love these old canals. I can't think of any more pleasant way to enjoy a boating holiday than gliding through towns, villages and lovely countryside aboard a narrowboat.
It was absolutely magical! can't wait to doit again
The existence of the canal system (which covers most of England as well as parts of Wales and Scotland) was the reason that Great Britain's Industrial Revolution began well ahead of every other country. Not only did canal company investors receive astonishing returns on their money, the integration of industrial and manufacturing centres was the driver of Britain's prosperity and mid-19th century global superpower status. The engineering of the canals also greatly facilitated the development of the railway and road systems which followed. You usually find all three running closely together now.
I haven't regretted buying a narrowboat for relaxing and interesting retirement leisure; also drinking a great deal of good beer.
Congratulations on the channel. A thoughtful alternative to 'shop' videos.
Indeed, such as Gravelly Hill interchange. Three canals, two rivers, and then three or four major roads all on top of this maze. I have cycled through the canal bit.
England is very beautiful, I can only imagine the glory if a beautiful summer day! Maybe I can visit one day.
Superb engineering and SHOW !! Thank you !
Thanks to this beautiful video I can now say "been there done that." Truly spectacular. And what a gorgeous dog at 2:20.
Such beautiful scenery. I love Britain, my home for two years in the early ’70s.
absolutely gorgeous - top-notch time lapses, too
i was lucky enough to have time to take a walk down the chesapeake & ohio canal when i was in DC years ago, and while it wasn't quite so narrow, it too was very beautiful. old canals (with towpaths!) are really quite something - just the lock systems on their own are amazing
Brilliant video, loved it!
Great video. I biked along a large section of this canal with my grandad when I was a kid, loved learning about the engineering.
This is beautiful, your channel is making me want to go visit a few of these places.
Brings back memories :) One of many beautiful places to visit!
Beautiful video
Cool. An interesting topic (that someone or many someones, have studied) is to compare river barges, in the UK and France with the UK canal system. When you watch shows like Time Team and they excavate an early Industrial Revolution site, it's often far out in the countryside, in large part to keep it near the main source of energy: water. (Larger rivers are not such good sources as they are often barely above sea level).
I too want to spend some time on a narrow boat noodling around the canal system. It fits right in with hiking and camping in parks. Who would willingly camp next to train stations, truck depots, or major ports? This, along with your terrific video shows how green and natural most of the areas the canals traverse.
Moving goods by water is very efficient (I've long advocated including 'the boat' or buoyancy as the 7th Simple Machine. It's so obvious.).
My guess would be that the Brits didn't see, and couldn't even imagine, the scale or concentration that industry and commerce would so rapidly expand to. They made the canals too narrow (take a look at the Soviet White Sea-Baltic Canal). Then there's the disruption caused by railroads, and their ability to rapidly scale up: volume and tonnage (add another car). I wonder if narrow boats could carry shipping containers if the canals might be more commercially viable. They are an amazing, and probably under-developed tourist resource.
Are you going to do a video on the Falkirk Wheel? I know it's modern. (They say that each cradle has the exact same weight and a motor moves the wheel. I find this a bit curious. If the dropping cradle had just a bit more water in it, it would be enough to power the the movement. When you get around to it, find the engineer and ask him why it wasn't done this way.)
We enjoyed a narrow boat rental trip along those canals a number of years ago. It’s easy to relax at 3 mph. Even if you are manning the tiller in the rain with a hot cup of Typhoo provided by the first mate from the tiny galley belowdecks. It was a wonderful time.
awesome stuff. It must be great fun to navigate these waters.
that was sooo cool n beautiful !!! thanks .
oh wow, i'd love to visit this canal!
Wow : D Such an interesting and beautifully done video. Thank You for that!
Absolutely beautiful. I'm going to have to throw that on the bucket list. The elevated Canal looks like the sidewall was varied narrow (thin) compared to the rest of the structure.
You just cant fucking beat that .. What a view.
Thanks for the wonderful set of videos! I hope you can soon become the "Connections" of the 21st century. Keep up the great work.
Machine Thinking is such a great channel!
i love this, wish it was longer lol more time lapse bu, wondorful please keep it up!
A lot of boat owners will go down into the cabin and let the boat bump it's way over the aqueduct... I'm loving your channel... did you know that this canal is very unique as it has a slight current, water flows into the canal from the river Dee Horseshoe as a water feeder to Chester. Something you may also find interesting is the Lapal Canal tunnel in Birmingham, perhaps the worlds first ever 'Flume' it used water a head powered by steam to flush boats though. You should also look at the Anderton LIft, The Foxton Inclined Plane the Falkirk wheel and the Bingley 5 rise all gems of canal engineering.. and dont forget the Crofton Beam Engines for the Boulton and Watt...
Love this video!
_Cruising the Cut_ comes to mind viewing this. What a fun video!
Edit: A video on the narrowboat elevator in the UK would be really amazing. There’s so much interesting history and engineering you could explore in that piece.
@machinethinking, now I want to visit it too! This channels is awesome 😀
That looks amazing. I am tremendously jealous.
It took me about 15 years before I was there and it was worth it!
Truly fascinating. Thank you for all the wonderful and informative content you provide. You're like Professor TOT ;-)
Great fun, as usual.
Beautiful landscapes. No wonder the Brits are so proud of their country.
Thank you for sharing this with us.
also i find old pocket watches like repeaters facinating. making them little gears. and off by a few seconds a year. just amazing
I found it interesting the speed at which the boat moved. In several segments you can see the same two pedestrians walking, sometimes even pulling far ahead of the boat.
Yes, those pedestrians are members of our crew who walked ahead to warn us of oncoming boats (especially when there were moored boats on the sides as well), bridges, narrows, etc. as we quickly learned that navigating a 26 ton vessel in a narrow canal required much planning on the part of the skipper! We tended to go faster in straighter parts and also as the week went on and we got better. Also those pedestrians are marathon runners and walk quickly!
The maximum speed on a UK narrowboat canal is 4 mph as the wash from faster speeds can damage the canal banks.
A beatifull canal, I have been walking along a stretch of it but still have to see the best parts of it as this video shows.
A huge difference between the UK and other countries is that it's canal system stopped to develop after the advent of the railways.
Coutries on the continent kept on building new canals and upgrading older ones parallel to the expension of railways, because for bulk goods canals were still a cheaper option in relative flat areas.
Canals and the boats and barges navigating on them grew bigger and bigger, some canals in The Netherlands allow for 10.000 ton ships.
And even in the not so flat part of the Netherlands in the south east a canal was built in the 1930's to transport vast amounts of coal from the mines to the rest of the country.
In this canal, the Juliana kanaal, a set of locks was built which can hold ships 80m long and 12m wide, the locks bring the ships up or down 15m/50ft in one stage.
Also large rivers trough Europe were made suit for inland shipping, like the Rhine, Meuse, Seine, Elbe and Danube rivers, as was done with some rivers in the US, like the Missisippi, Ohio and Missouri, all still having a sizeable amount of commercial freight transport being slower but cheaper than rail transport, in cases of continuous trafic of product to certain ports or customers the speed isn't that important, as long as the continuous flow is not interrupted, like this summer the hot wheater and draughts lowering the water level and thus limmiting tonnages of ships, creating the need to pull more vessels in on certain product flows, and making transport less cost effective at that point.
Sometimes the companies having the contracts couldn't bring in additional vessels thus running behind in deliveries, that was when captains were asked to go as fast as they could and were allowed to go on the rivers.
However, a canal like the Llangollen canal would be to costly to upgrade for larger vessels, so the railways were a more cost effective replacement, as you can raise the tonnage transported by making the trains longer and the engines more powerfull without the need to widen and deepen the infrastructure.
But there were some regions in the UK were widening of canals would have made sense, like the south east.
Underrated video
I grew up in the UK & I never remember it being sunny!!
CGI
hey we had a sunny day today and it's technically still the middle of winter :)
"I grew up in the UK & I never remember it being sunny!!" Ah. That was before UA-cam.
Great video! I have walked along the towpath from Llangollen to Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and it is beautiful. This section was built to feed water from the River Dee into the main canal system. It is shallow and very narrow, but runs level and has no locks. Upstream from Llangollen to the Horseshoe Falls is only navigable by the horsedrawn pleasure boats. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llangollen_Canal
awesome vid loved it ...peace out
You missed the opportunity to speak about Thomas Telford , the father of modern transportation engineering.
I live near here and have walked through the tunnel which feels scary. The cast iron aqueduct always worries me. The iron side seems so thin and I keep expecting the iron to snap and empty the water (and any boats) into the valley below. In the 1980s I helped extricate a boat that had tried to enter the locks at Hurleston Junction and become stuck like a cork in a bottle. The boats on the Shropshire Union canal are wider than the locks on the Llangollen Canal but there are no signs in place to warn people about this and so the endless cycle of trouble and damage continues. To save money the Llangollen was made narrower than standard canals but certainly passes through very beautiful countryside.
Thank You...informative with style...I noticed the boats pass on the right . I would have expected it to be on the left as with cars in England....tm
Amaing video!
Canals are really cool.
That ride should help relieve some stress!👍
Hey man! Just wanted to thank you for sharing this amazing piece of human effort into my attention!
Im always geeking off about technology, im learning as much as i can so later in life i move to the Countryside to work the land organically and living the Self-Suficcient Dream!
where ill' attend to my creative urges in the coolest workshop my effort and knowdelge can make!
My deam is to build my own tools that i can use to make more tools, its impressive the ammount of technical oportunities for creating high quality precision parts you can have with only a bench mill, and a big ol' quality metal lathe.
so, with saving some money i can invest it in what it'll be the best years of my fuckin' life.
In the end, everyone is a boat tuber!
(I've been narrow-boat obsessed for the last year, and interested for a couple of decade before then. In the last year I have discovered the ever-growing Boat Tuber community, which I started with Cruising The Cut.)
You and your thoughtful and informative vids are greatly missed mate. Hope you are faring well these days.
I am well! Literally working on a script right now!
Drive past both the Chirk and Pontcysyllte/Froncysyllte aqueducts daily. It doesn't look so high, when you are in a boat looking straight down, as it appears from the car looking up from the old stone road bridge below. Unfortunately, the river is in flood at the moment but it was great to see it how it normally is.
Lovely video, shows the canal and its features well, as does it also show the kind of relaxed pace of this kind of 'cruising'... infinitely preferable to 'cruising' on those floating hotel monstrosities.
Much enjoying you channel. BTW, have you ever seen Dan Gelbart's series? Dan was the kind of guy who had a new basement room constructed specifically for his Moore jig borer, and metrology gear.
You lucky devil! god I miss England!
Thank you ,
Very cool.
Those gears at the beginning may benefit from some grease, though.
Was this canal featured in James Burke’s great series _Connections_ ?
We love the Rochdale canals, you climb _over_ the Pennines in a boat, then go _through_ them in a 3 kilometer tunnel
Is no one else going to comment on how thin the canal wall is on the last crossing!!!! 3inches between your boat and the drop while you are stood on it!!!!
Please do a video on the Erie Canal
The scenery was beautiful, the aqueduct was fascinating, but looking over that narrow edge to the valley below made me nervous.
It's not often that you could fall to your death from a boat 4 feet above the waterline...
they need to have a jet ski race on this... or at least have it as a level in a video game
Canal boats drive on the right in England? The horror!
Boats pass port to port everywhere, unless there are specific reasons not to. That's a worldwide convention, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Regulations_for_Preventing_Collisions_at_Sea
Mishn0 Yes but like the cars in England with the steering wheel on the right, the starboard or "STEERBOARD". (Rudder) was on the left...go figure...
@@neuxstone starboard is actually the right side of a vessel
NickleJ yes. That’s what I believe I said however if not sorry for the confusion.
...and Wales!
The original lazy river*!! I've wanted to live on a canal boat for many years. *amusement at American water parks.
I was looking forward to hearing a voice-over with pronunciation of "Llangollen" and "Pontcysyllte"! ;-)
Having heard the locals say it I knew there was no way I'd get it right! Better to have music! :D
Every time I hear Pontcysyllte pronounced correctly I practise it till I can say it then memorise it, and then when I want to say it sometime in the future, out comes a load of gobbledygook.
Future site for Red Bull jet ski races?
Coming from viewing machining videos and accidentally stumbling upon (not having it suggested by UA-cam) this apparently completely unrelated content on the exact same day CruisingTheCut chose to publish a video on the exact same subject feels remarkably spooky. Luckily I've long given up any illusions concerning the ability of humans to reasonably judge probability...
0:10 i thought it was a piano version of thunderstruck ac/dc hahahaha
Spent a weekend in Llangollen. Had a great time. I even know how to pronounce it. ha ha ha
I noticed the video was unusual in not having a voice-over. I think I know why.
do the locks only go downhill? otherwise how do you get raised up?
Locks work in both directions. At about 1:27 you can see us piloting into a lock towards upriver and then in the following clip the boat is going up. Essentially with the water down you open the gate and motor in, close the gate behind you and then open the paddles from the upriver side which will flood the lock. Then you just open the gates at the upriver side and motor out. I actually like going up better because you and do it with the motor off and if you're in the boat the sounds of the inrushing water under the boat are truly errie.
the locks either fill or empty, a boat floating on them either rises or falls by floating on the water
These canals sure are neat to see and to watch the narrow boats come & go. I watch videos about these canals on a somewhat regular basis, but I have a question: Does anybody fish these canals? I have never seen anyone with a fishing rod in any of the videos...odd...??
Yes many people fish them. My mother used to have a house where the garden backed onto the Birmingham canal.One day a friend who was into fishing talked me into fishing it in the space of 2 hours we caught 34 fish albeit small ones.
nick...Thanks...I bet that was fun..! I knew that there must be fish in those canals but was just curious that none of the videos ever showed anyone fishing.
The water is not particularly clean as well as being shallow, not condusive to healthy fish. A narrowboater I follow said the custom is to catch and release.
How is elevation used to engineer navagational canals
due to medical problems, it is difficult for me to read the captions. So I had to stop at each caption read it, and then restart the video. I still enjoyed it, but narration would have been a plus. Thanks for sharing.
Then he would have had to try to pronounce the name of the canal.
You should take a 360 camera there
At 3:40 the drop is on my side of the boat, can you move a little to the right please.
It's your fault. I've now just got to go and visit. Thank you.
That's the life...
I think the railway had to cross the canal from west side to east at Chirk and also avoid an expensive tunnel. Nothing to do with the railway viaduct being built higher to ‘show the superiority of railways’😇
You know, I'm slightly dubious about that claim as well, but it is on the sign right next to the canal ...
This didn't need to be sped up so much. I would have liked it if it was twice as long and I could really get into the footage.
Play it back at half speed.
I say Sir I'd like a weird looking boat.
1790's Boatbuilder:Say no more Sir, I got it.
Are there laws or rules that prevent canoes, kayaks or small power boats from using the canal system?
We saw many people in kayaks and occasionally more modern powered boats, though small. I imagine the lock size is typically the limit of boat size and the narrowboats are best suited to them.
There's no problem using a canoe on the canal. I was working with a group of 10 year olds in canoes on the section of the Llangollen canal between the Horseshoe Weir and the quay where the horse-drawn boats operate from on Wednesday last week. You need to be aware of the narrow boats (powered and horse drawn), as they as less manoeuvrable (and harder to stop!) than a small canoe. If you're not a member of Canoe Wales or British Canoeing, you'll need a licence: canalrivertrust.org.uk/enjoy-the-waterways/canoeing-and-kayaking/licensing-your-canoe
@@DavidRoberts01341 how clean is the water? I once did a canal trip in France and the water was very contaminated.
I'm just spellbound.....
The video is really interesting, just TOO FAST - -I had to repeatedly pause in order to see things, and re-track to read the captions. A little re-edit and slow down would make it much more accessible.
The video is what it is. That won't change. You can change the speed of your playback of the video.
Moves at walking speed. . . Or less 😀
*The bridge isn't DANGEROUS!?? :-o*
Think about pop up swimming pools in gardens with much deeper sides that are not made of iron and you will realise that pressure on the side is quite low compared to what would cause failure. The other thing to note is that when a boat goes over the aqueduct it displaces its own weight of water. This means that the boat going over at walking speed makes no difference to the weight the bridge supports are holding up as the water has time to flow away and around the boat. It would take a lot more speed to create a major bow wave and so increase the supported weight. The Falkirk Wheel has similar properties so that it is always balanced no mater how large or small the boats it raises and lowers are.
Good --- if oversped --- video, but the music could do without the claps, which are Very distracting.
2:05 Really? I thought railways were just made to be economical with grades kept under 1% wherever possible.
It's what all the signs around it say: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirk_Aqueduct#Description
@@machinethinking I don't doubt it says that, but logic and common sense are fighting me on believing it. BTW, your channel has the feel of a very well established channel. I was blown away to see 3,000 subs when I thought I would see 3,000,000. You got 2+ hpurs of watch time out of me! I see you spend a freat deal of time editing. I dont mind background music during lathe operations, but if levels were kept a little lower, I wouldn't meed to adjust. $.02
Wholly Cow! I just saw that your subs have doubled in 24 hours! Keep up the awesome work. I haven't said this to another, but the editing and quality of material has nudged this old tony from my top spot! Keep it up!
I had the exact same thought, such an unexplained assertion, even if it is documented in reputable sources, just rubs me wrong. I'll throw a question on Quora and see whether someone can resolve that, i'll let you lot know if i can find a satisfactory explanation.
kinda sad that modern bridges don't last like those old stone ones...
I've got!!
What if the bridge was ALWAYS at maximum load?
By God, Perkins..
Get out of my office.
Don't get lazy, record some narration. People don't want to miss the video while they're reading captions.
Canal boating is slow. That's one of its main feature and beauty.
If you keep speeding the video because you don't know how to edit and canot choose good footage … then the whole beauty of canals boating is lost.
Needs more jump cuts.
I don't see anybody fishing?
Water not very clean in most canals, shallow as well. Catch and release is common for those who fish. Not swimmable water either.
@@cdouglas1942 Whenever I see water I think- "what could I catch there"?
You couldn’t narrate this one?
just had to ruin it with the annoying music didn't you?
Easy remedy if you don't like the music is to turn the sound down. There is no narration, and as it is time lapse, no natural sound to miss...