Is it just for leisure or commercial traffic?
it's a lot smaller than I imagined. I can't picture a river barge fitting in it, but it's hard to tell the scale
The Falkirk Wheel
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#22Is it just for leisure or commercial traffic? it's a lot smaller than I imagined. I can't picture a river barge fitting in it, but it's hard to tell the scale
Leisure only, there hasn't been commercial traffic on that canal for a long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Canal_(Scotland)
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#23If the area was a major commercial shipping hub once, what's the reason it isn't any more? Depopulation? (If it's depopulation, then was it emigration or was it a fall in birth rates?)
From Wikipedia: > The town is at the junction of the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals, a location which proved key to its growth as a centre of heavy industry during the Industrial Revolution. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Falkirk was at the centre of the iron and steel industry, underpinned by the Carron Company in nearby Carron. The company made very many different items, from flat irons to kitchen ra…
> But being at a key canal junction doesn't mean much today, since modern railroads and steamships rendered the canals obsolete a century-ish ago.
That is true for the English narrow channels which are way too narrow to support any kind of large vessel, but not true in general - the Mittellandkanal in Germany for example still sees a huge amount of traffic and there’s regular infrastructure investment going on into the canal network in many places. One example is the new boat lift in Niederfinow which is not as architecturally beautiful as the Falkirk wheel, but lifts entire river barges.
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#24Suprisingly, the "axe head" sections each on one side of the circular top and bottom openings are unnessecary to the functioning, and just there for show. It's also near a fort on the Antonine Wall, a further-north version of Hadrian's wall- so it's been the shortest route across Britain for quite a long time...
I have walked across it on the John Muir Way which is highly recommended. I actually didn't really remember what Hadrian's wall was. We always learnt it was to "keep out the Scots", but in fact it represented the Northernmost border of the Roman empire. I had no idea about the Antonine wall, nor that they got that far north.
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#25One of the truly great things from my old homeland. In the year 2000 Falkirk invented the wheel...
There are still some Neanderthals in Falkirk now shouting at hotels.
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#26I am exactly the type of nerd that is super excited about this kind of engineering, to the point where I visited a couple years ago and rode a boat on the wheel when I happened to be in Scotland. I mentioned having gone to a local in Edinburgh and got a very confused "why would you ever go to Falkirk?" It's a pretty easy half-day trip out of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and I recommend it if you have the time.
One fun thing if you have kids is that the playground there has some demonstrations of Archimedean principles, like how an Archimedes screw works. Also, I don't keep many souvenirs of my travels, but I do have a refrigerator magnet of the Falkirk wheel that spins freely. It doubles as a cat toy.
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#27Is it just for leisure or commercial traffic? it's a lot smaller than I imagined. I can't picture a river barge fitting in it, but it's hard to tell the scale
British canals are smaller than you imagine, and were even when they were commercial waterways. The standard lock widths are only 7ft or 14ft (2.1m/4.3m) so the boats are narrow, proportionally long, and very small compared to a Rhine barge or something.
As with the railways, we built early, to a small gauge, and lived with the consequences of that later.
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#28Suprisingly, the "axe head" sections each on one side of the circular top and bottom openings are unnessecary to the functioning, and just there for show. It's also near a fort on the Antonine Wall, a further-north version of Hadrian's wall- so it's been the shortest route across Britain for quite a long time...
I have walked across it on the John Muir Way which is highly recommended. I actually didn't really remember what Hadrian's wall was. We always learnt it was to "keep out the Scots", but in fact it represented the Northernmost border of the Roman empire. I had no idea about the Antonine wall, nor that they got that far north.
Picts not Scots.
The Scots are descended from an Irish Gaelic (Celtic) tribe who migrated from Ireland to Scotland in the 5th Century [0] (when all three of Britain's countries were created, it was a fascinating century).
The Romans were there before then, and left before then. The walls they built were to keep the Picts out (though this gets fuzzy - the line between "Pict" and "Briton" isn't as clear as conventional Victorian history books say).
One of the interesting things that I heard about the walls, and may or may not be true (I'd be interested if anyone has an update) is that the Romans never explored the top of the island, or sailed around it, and just assumed there was a lot more of it going north. If they'd known how close they were to the end, they might have just conquered all of it, which would probably have been less effort than building those two walls.
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#29Is it just for leisure or commercial traffic? it's a lot smaller than I imagined. I can't picture a river barge fitting in it, but it's hard to tell the scale
British canals are smaller than you imagine, and were even when they were commercial waterways. The standard lock widths are only 7ft or 14ft (2.1m/4.3m) so the boats are narrow, proportionally long, and very small compared to a Rhine barge or something. As with the railways, we built early, to a small gauge, and lived with the consequences of that later.
> so the boats are narrow, proportionally
Hence the name "narrowboat".
Re: The Falkirk Wheel
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
From Wikipedia: > The town is at the junction of the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals, a location which proved key to its growth as a centre of heavy industry during the Industrial Revolution. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Falkirk was at the centre of the iron and steel industry, underpinned by the Carron Company in nearby Carron. The company made very many different items, from flat irons to kitchen ra…
(The nearest container port is Leith, which is about twenty miles away.)
Grangemouth is the larger container port in Scotland (not very large by global standards) and much closer to Falkirk than Leith?