Boats instead of high speed rail

BOATER Terry Fogarty has put forward his own plans as an alternative to the £18 billion high-speed rail link from Birmingham to London, using the waterways.

He points out that the narrow canals of Birmingham should be widened, and would help solve Birmingham's transport problems at a fraction of the cost, Alan Tilbury tells us.

A tube

His idea is that using a diagonal lock, somehow in the shape of a sloping tube instead of locks would allow boats to go from the top of the flight to the bottom in one swoop, which would solve the long delays at the narrow lock flights at a fraction of the cost of the high speed rail link.

Of the waterways in the city he remarks:

"But at the moment you can only get narrowboats along it. There has been years of neglect and the network cries out for improvement.

"Nowhere is this more apparent than at Camp Hill locks, where the 300 years old narrow lock flight meets the Grand Union Canal. This offers the potential for wide beam boats to move down to London. The shame of it is that a wide-beam boat coming from London is prevented from entering the canals of Birmingham, which is a tragedy."

The time taken for a boat to reach London from Birmingham in relation to a high speed train and its limited capacity was not mentioned.  As neither was last December when ice made the waterway completely impassable.