A challenge for CaRT

LAST month we came up the Shroppie and as we came through the famous Woodseaves Cutting a number of bank slips set me thinking about the challenge this feature sets for CART and how boaters, often quick to complain about the level of maintenance, would set their own priorities, writes Mike Todd.

Not only is this stretch one of the more beautiful on the network but it forms one of the vital links, without which many of the highly popular circular routes would not be possible. It is not a fanciful guess but I suspect the great majority of boaters would put keeping the Shroppie open very high up their priority list.

Canal's attractiveness

But not only is this cutting (and the many other embankments and cuttings  that were needed in order to meet the original developers' ambition to built straight to ease the work of boatmen) part of the canal's attractiveness, but also a testament to the efforts of 'navigators' who had only primitive equipment—and lots of brawn— to move endless tons of earth.

In an effort to contain costs, some of the cuttings were built with vertiginous sides, sometimes almost vertical. Not only did this reduce the amount of earth shifting but also minimised the amount of land that had to be bought. In places, although the alignment of the canal is straight, they did, metaphorically 'cut corners' and have left us now with a real maintenance headache.

Stoppages

Regularly there are stoppages —some quite lengthy— as unplanned repairs have to be made following the latest slippage or tree collapse. As we passed through we spotted not only some of the more recent repairs but many other places where smaller scale slippages are 'active'.

It would take an expert to decide which ones are likely to be no more than a nuisance and those which will lead to major problems, but my guess is that it is not much better than predicting where the next earthquake will happen!

Realistically be kept open

So what do CaRT do? This situation is clearly 'high maintenance' and, in the mindset of earlier decades, must have caused some consideration of whether the canal could realistically be kept open. Of course, with modern soil mechanics behind them, CaRT could calculate a safe angle for the sides of the cuttings and re-configure them accordingly. This would reduce future maintenance but at an enormous capital cost, even alongside the speculative projects which Victor so often highlights!

If CaRT allocate much the same amount of resources per mile for maintenance to this canal as for all the others then there will inevitably be much more frequent closure whilst unplanned repairs are carried out. On the other hand, if CaRT set a maintenance budget for the Shroppie consistent with, let us say, an emergency closure every ten years, then all of the rest of the network would suffer. Kept at a common level per mile then this canal will have most of its resources devoted to slippage repair with lock gates, weirs and dredging virtually excluded.

So, I ask other boaters, and myself, What prioritisation would you make?

Photographs are by the author.