02-24-2013, 05:54 AM
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Member
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: On the edge of the river valley
Posts: 1,474
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Playing in Google right quick found Stone stop-off for Diamond Jubilee boat - A Little Bit of Stone which has pic of steam narrowboat tug in action.
Also found Steam on Canals
Quote:
This is the text of the chapter “The Steam Narrow Boat” from C.P. and C.R Weaver’s definitive book “Steam on Canals”, published by David & Charles in 1983.
It provides an excellent introduction to the craft researched in this website. The book is available through specialist booksellers or on the Internet under ISBN 0-7153-8218-7
The cargo-carrying steam narrow boat was always something of a rarity because the space taken up by the smallest steam plant so reduced the carrying capacity that the boat became uneconomic unless it towed at least one other craft. Such operation was practical only on long, lock-free stretches of canal, or on a wide canal where both boats could use the same lock; thus the steam narrow boat was largely confined to the wide Grand Junction Canal and its narrow connections to Birmingham and Leicester. The most successful operator of such boats was Fellows, Morton & Clayton Ltd, who got results by working their craft really hard. Even so, the small FMC fleet fell somewhat short of the perfection with which legend has endowed it.
Attempts to perfect steam road vehicles in the 1820s led to the first light and compact steam engines capable of being fitted into a canal boat. Probably the first to install a steam engine into a narrow boat was John McCurdy, who in 1826 attempted a voyage from London to Oxford in a boat fitted with his patent `duplex steam generators' and propelled by a rear-mounted paddle wheel that could be lifted inboard while passing through locks. The duplex generator was a form of flash boiler in which water was sprayed into a number of small iron cylinders set around the furnace, one of the first reasonably successful low-water-content, high-pressure boilers. In 1828 McCurdy made a successful trip from London to Manchester in the same boat, or one quite like it, and on this trip hauled a butty. His contemporary, David Gordon, the inventor of bottled gas, tried hard to establish regular steam services between London, Bristol, the Midlands and Merseyside in the late 1820s. Such plans were nullified by the overnight success of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway and subsequent railway construction.
In 1837 John Ericsson tested his newly invented screw propeller in a narrow boat fitted out by his good friends Braithwaite, Milner & Co.
... (much more on page)
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Screw the rivets, I'm building for atmosphere, not detail.
later, F Scott W
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