 A
horse pulling a barge is an extremely efficient form of
transport.
At a steady walking speed a horse can move
approximately fifty times as much weight in a boat as it could
with a cart on old fashioned roads, possibly a hundred times its
own body weight. The load moves with minimal friction whilst the
strength of the animal is linked directly to the load with
little wasted energy and it was this efficiency equation that
inspired the development of the canal system in the eighteenth
century. It was also this same old-fashioned horsepower that
kept it going profitably for a century and a half thereafter.
Even after the widespread introduction of
steam and motor boats horse-drawn craft continued to operate and
compete with them until the middle of the twentieth century.
Horses are a critically important part of canal history, but a
part that is in danger of being overlooked in this mechanical
age. It wasn’t so much the steam engine that created the
industrial revolution as the horse that brought the coal to the
boiler in the first place.
Boats are only transport when they move. The
cheapest way of moving is to drift, using the current, but on
inland rivers this is obviously a one way traffic, downstream.
On tidal rivers like the Thames the flow can be used each way,
ebb and flood, but in general the boatman needs some extra power
to get very far upriver. Sails are fine if the wind is in the
right direction (and the river’s straight) but British weather
is always a gamble. |
