Compton to Birmingham
Saturday 6th February 2010
Zulu in Wolverhampton Top Lock
Thanks for the help at Wolverhampton Locks, Springy, whoever you were! What a result – 24 hours earlier I had posted a request in Canal World Forums for someone to help lockwheeling up the Wolverhampton flight this morning, and hey presto Springy turned up windlass and anti-vandal key in hand after a brief discussion on the internet.
The flight is in very good condition and the locks are all pretty easy but single handed walking ahead and back, you end up walking more than double the distance. With 21 locks this makes a four mile walk, on top of 126 gate openings and closings, and hundreds of paddles to wind.
So with an extra pair of hands we made very light work of it and arrived at the top lock just before 11am, not quite 3 hours after starting. Copious cups of coffee and lock-cooked bacon and eggs kept us going strong. Springy turned out to be a most knowledgeable boater, as are so many members on Canal World and it made a very pleasant morning’s boating.
Once at the top I bade Springy goodbye and made good use of the immaculate BW service facilities at Broad Street before setting off in search of a suitable mooring to leave Zulu until next weekend.
Where better to look than Waterscape.com, since every question I have asked British Waterways in the last two years has been answered with “have you checked waterscape.com?”
Well I did, confirming that 14 day moorings are few and far between on the BCN, and on most of them you wouldn’t want to leave the boat unattended for too long, so what better than the 14 day moorings at Dudley’s Black Country Museum – behind lock and key; this is as good as it gets.
I pottered along past a few dog walkers and a couple of anglers, looking forward to another feature which I had just discovered on waterscape. “Coseley Tunnel: Risk of throwing of stones and other missiles”
Coseley Tunnel without being stoned
Who was going to throw them? There wasn’t a soul in sight of the towpath. I have no doubt that in years gone by a bored group of local lads discovered that it was fun to frighten boaters, but this should surely not become a documented note on the navigation guide as these things come and go as the perpetrators grow up, move on to more rewarding crimes or get locked up. Or maybe I was just lucky today. In fact I later did pass a group of 10-12 year olds chucking bricks into the water at Dudley, but not at the boat. No need to add this to waterscape yet thanks, BW. Maybe when they are 14 and on glue …..
So I arrived at Dudley just after 3pm, missing the last tunnel trip boat of the day – which is a shame as I have never been through before, but noted that on the first Sunday of the month they operate a trip all the way through the tunnel, which sounds worth coming back for.
Extract from the Boaters Guide to BCN
I was however moored on a 48 hour mooring so needed to find the 14 day alternative – the very reason I had come here – but it was patently obvious that there was no such thing. Waterscape.com has once again provided incorrect information. With some of the moorings being private, others for museum customers only that only leaves room for half a dozen boats at the most and all 48 hours max. So at half three, I decided to push on to Birmingham and back tracked to Factory Junction. I really enjoyed the three Factory Locks which rank among my favourites. They are unusual in having a continuous straight brickwork edge from the top to the bottom, so in theory you can pull the boat out of one lock, close the gates and then walk ahead while the boat drifts onwards towards the next lock, opening the gate and watching it glide in. Don’t try this on a windy day folks, but today I had the whole place to myself and dropped down the three locks in just over 15 minutes total.
About 100 yards beyond the bottom lock I noticed the most enormous heap of beer cans on the bridge embankment to the left. I reached for the camera, but quickly put it back when I saw the most likely source of the mess – a large group of Tipton’s finest hoodies had obviously made this some kind of headquarters, right above the can mountain, and several appeared involved in taking stronger stuff than lager. Better to push on than get involved in handing out rubbish bags, lest I should become their contents.
As it got dark the cold set in, and I began to wonder if the scaremongering press, notably the Daily Express, were going to be right about another cold spell heading our way. Definitely best to be secure in Birmingham in case this happens and the canal freezes over again! With an extra coat and gloves on, the rest of the journey was wonderful – I didn’t see one single person between Dudley Port and Sherbourne Wharf.
Zulu at Birmingham 48 hr Moorings
It was about 7pm when I arrived in Birmingham and the first thing I noticed was that the moorings between Sherbourne Loop and the next bridge are 14 days, on both sides of the canal too. Grrrrrr Waterscape.com doesn’t mention this at all, making a mockery of the information it provides, where it says all moorings are 48 hours apart from Cambrian Wharf which I knew to have three 14 day moorings. Well at least that was the another problem solved. This area has a really nice feel to it, with security cameras all over the place, and residential balconies all along. For a Saturday night the whole place was very quiet indeed and I didn’t half sleep well!
Today’s total is a respectable 25 locks and 23 miles and I feel that arriving in Birmingham has been a major milestone in the journey. The only available route south from here is going to be down Farmers Bridge locks, then Aston and up Camp Hill to join the Grand Union at its northernmost point at Solihull, all of which needs to be done in one session due to lack of moorings, so thats probably what I will do next weekend, heading for Hatton where there’s a very convenient station. Now whilst I would have been absolutely happy to do Wolverhampton locks alone but appreciated some assistance, Hatton flight is another matter altogether and I won’t be doing them single handed unless I have no choice. I therefore give you advance notice that if anyone is interested in helping me down Hatton, I would really really appreciate your help in a couple or three weeks time!
Meanwhile thanks again to Springy. It was great to meet you and without your help I would definitely not be writing this from Birmingham!
Giving it another try
Friday 5th February 2010
Its been two weeks since I parked up in Compton so on this sunny afternoon, even warm, I paid £48.20 to a machine at Newbury station in exchange for a piece of card with Wolverhampton written on it.
I hesitate to call it a train ticket, as this would imply there would be somewhere to sit in comfort, sipping a coffee or maybe a beer - well it is the weekend after all. No,no,no. There was a train though - the 17:11 Cross Country Reading to Manchester - so I had the choice of not getting on it, or getting on it. The vestibule, as the “Train Manager” called it, was as far as I got until Banbury, initially sitting on the floor but after another ten people got on it was inevitable that standing was to be the method of travel.
Seated for the second half of the journey, I had by now listened to the cheerful Train Manager telling us that the quiet zone was at the back, but the buffet car wouldn’t be opening due to a “staff vacancy”, at least half a dozen times. What about the poor people who couldn’t even get in this train left behind on the platform at Oxford? How on earth have we allowed the railway system to deteriorate to this extent.
Back to the boating then, here I am back on Zulu tonight, enjoying 3G access with my Three modem - worth noting, as t-Mobile didn’t work here at all last time.
So Wolverhampton Locks, here we come again.
See you there in the morning (oh go on - you know you want to do some locks!)
Unforeseeable future for Anderton Services
British Waterways have just mailed out a stoppage notice containing a most wonderful phrase. Can you spot it or is just my sense of humour which has gone wrong again. Their crystal ball must be out of action too.
Here it is in all its glory.
Unforeseeable stoppage
Brewood to Compton and a taste of Wolverhampton
Secure moorings at Wolverhampton - no access at all without a boat
Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th January
Time to move on now that the ice has all thawed out earlier in the week, but to where? The route south is blocked in so many places due to maintenance stoppages that we can’t reach Uxbridge until Easter at the earliest.
So whilst I could go up to Great Haywood then down the Trent and Mersey to Fradley, the route beyond is blocked at Atherstone unless I went all the way to the Trent, up the River Soar to Leicester but that area is currently closed to all Navigation due to flooding. Alternatively I could head up the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal into the centre of Birmingham, but that would just be a huge diversion to the more direct route straight up the Wolverhampton Locks in which we got stuck in the ice three weeks ago. Although this route is now completely thawed out, and I could stop on the 14 day moorings in the centre of Birmingham at Cambrian Wharf, this would be better delayed until I have a few days to so some exploring on the BCN rather than just going there for the sake of it. There aren’t many other safe places to leave the boat on the BCN so I will need to stay on board to get the best out of this part of the trip.
The decision point was Autherley Junction. Left towards Penkridge for a week or two? Right towards Compton for a week or two? Or down to Addersley and up the Wolverhampton locks? Indecision ruled and I went left, then changed my mind and spun round to go right. Compton for the night was the plan, with a chance to pick up diesel and hopefully some bits and pieces at Limekiln Chandlery. My indecision delayed my arrival at Limekiln until 4.05 pm, just in time to see them locking up and closing until Tuesday. Never mind - its a good enough place to stop for a while but I decided to push on down another lock to the next winding hole and then back as near as possible to town without being on a restricted mooring, so at least we are now pointing in the right direction.
I then had a chance to test out whether Wolverhampton really is the 5th Worst City on earth, as claimed a couple of weeks ago by Lonely Planet. I took the bus intending to go to Brewood to collect the car and missed the connection by 1 minute, forcing me to wander round Wolverhampton for 2 hours. It was not pleasant, although I did have a nice walk down some of the locks and then up to Horsley Fields Junction. I can thoroughly recommend not visiting MacDonalds, where the morning clientelle were almost all rough sleepers hugging a coffee, virtually every table had slashed chairs and my breakfast tasted like it had been fried in second hand oil, while leaving the hash brown largely uncooked in the middle.
On the way back to the bus I passed derelict bars and shops, doorways full of sick and kebabs, several shop fronts splattered with white muddy gunk, rancid piles of rubbish down every stair well, groups of smokers outside every pub (before 10 am) and I even had to pay again on the bus to Brewood, despite having a day ticket from Compton, as the bus I was on was from a different company despite being branded as West Midlands transport. I do however compliment BW for the excellent facilites at Broad Street depot where the toilet and shower block has a stock of local information leaflets, and was spotlessly clean. It can be reached from the towpath with a BW key. Unfortunately the towpath is open to the public and the immaculate top lock was strewn with freshly broken bottles and someone has hurled a tin of blue paint at the bridge, with a trail of tyre marks and footprints running through it.
Off to Brewood by bus, and back to Compton by car for a few things off the boat, and then set off home. I had hardly done 2 miles when a helpful taxi driver pulled alongside and told me my back tyre was looking flat. Marvellous - have you ever tried to get a puncture fixed on a Sunday? By the time I located a Kwik Fit I was driving on a 90% flat tyre, so ordered a new one instead of a repair, and landed myself with a second chance to explore Wolverhampton.
While killing time in what is the most dismal of shopping malls, I almost got involved in a fight between a security guard and two guys he was trying to apprehend. I can’t comment on whether he had the right to physically restrain them, or whether they had the right to fight him off. One escaped, one got apprehended - I do hope he was guilty in order to justify being pinned to the floor, but he had just thrown one guard onto the ground and into a litter bin so I didn’t have much sympathy. It reminded me that last week I was in a local store on Tattenhall Road when the manager confronted a thief caught on CCTV. What kind of place is this? I’ve never witnessed one such event in my life let alone two in a week.
This has done nothing to improve my impression of Wolverhampton, and I must therefore take a view that The Lonely Planet were probably right on this occasion. Back to the car I paid the £118 bill and this time made as fast an exit from the place as I could manage!
8 miles, 4 locks and possibly slightly closer to Uxbridge as a result
Progress report from Brewood
Frozen Wolverhampton locks at Autherley
Tuesday 12th January 2010
No progress.
Today I took a drive up to Brewood just to check that Zulu was OK in the cold. Inside the cabin it had been minus 4 degrees and the water in the kettle was frozen solid. What a good job I drained the water system down before leaving last week.
Apart from that, everything was fine, apart from the frozen canal of course. Thin ice at Brewood, almost clear in places, turned very thick out of town. For a moment, deceived by the lack of snow on the roads, I though it may even be possible to d a bit of boating this week, and I took the dog for a walk along the old railway towards Autherley Junction. The Staffs and Worcester was once again ice free but up at the Junction it was even more frozen than last time and absolutely no sign of broken ice whatsoever, so unless someone can tell me otherwise, I don’t believe a single boat has managed to get up the Wolverhampton locks since I tried two weeks ago.
So back to the car, and back home just in time to miss the next wave of snow, which on Wednesday morning is now lying over 6 inches deep in places, with at least 2 inches of new snow falling overnight.
Zulu will have to stay put for the foreseeable future.
Dangerous sign of the week
Dangerous sign on the Regents Canal
While I was working in Little Venice and I used to pass under this sign at Lisson Grove Estate on the Regents Canal half a dozen times a day. Always made me smile.
Ecofan broken and repaired!
Ecofan Motor Replacement Kit
Most boat owners have at least heard about the Ecofan - very clever device which sits on the stove top and uses the thermal energy to power a tiny electric motor which spins a fan blade to help circulate the hot air further round the boat. In these low temperatures every little helps, and it was noticeable last week that the fan had stopped spinning as fast as normal.
A new Ecofan is quite an investment - including postage they are somewhere between 85 and 100 pounds depending on where you buy them, so I was interested to discover that a replacement motor kit is available for about £15.00 including postage, from the UK distrubutor.
Worth a punt I thought, so ordered one which arrived yesterday. Its not a totally straightforward operation, as the wires to the motor are soldered on, but with very clear instructions, I had the new motor fitted in minutes. I am delighted to say that the fan started spinning instantly and is now back to normal operation.
Bear it in mind if your Ecofan has stopped spinning. Its a lot cheaper than a replacement, and in this disposable world its nice to find something so specialised off the shelf.
Check out www.ecofan.co.uk for details.
The right kind of snow but wrong kind of news
The forecasters must be congratulating themselves this week, as certainly here in Berkshire we have had a good covering of snow - some 5 inches as at 9am on Wednesday, followed by three beautiful wintery days with a night time temperature reaching minus 9.5 and daytime not much over freezing.
But I knew the snow was coming towards us through another channel altogether, while the TV showed us spinning wheels on cars in Yorkshire, shot 12 hours ago and filmed normal streetscenes hoping someone may fall or at least slip on the ice, generally pumping out the same polished stories hour after hour.
http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk maps Twitter messages (tweets) which use the special hash tag “#uksnow” along with a postcode and a measurement of the snow currently falling. For instance tweeting ”#uksnow NG9 6/10″ would place a “pin” in this map in real time. It will also disappear after a short time to ensure the info is bang up to date and not some out of date list.
Nobody demanded that thousands of contributers should post their local information this way - the great net applications propagate themselves and here is a superb example where one person has grabbed a growing trend on Twitter and maximized it’s effectiveness. He even has an iPhone version for mobile use.
While BBC reporters in designer scarves search for local crises to justify their existance, people power is beginning to rule and the results are so much more specific that they actually mean something. Can the Beeb really justify the cost of hiring a helicopter to show us pictures of the M3 running pretty much normally last week?
For example today the BBC seem fixated on the number of schools closed due to the snow. 17? 170? 1700? what does it mean? Is your school in this number? Sounds good on the news but totally meaningless.
Apply the #uksnow principal and have every school tweet it’s real time status. Suddenly your school is in the map, quite literally and the meaningless stats are now so relevant.
Now back to canals. The press are never going to cover the ice on the canals in any detail, although today BW did declare that 90% of canals are iced over which is better than saying 1,700 miles are iced over but still meaningless if I want to check if Wolverhampton locks are passable.
People power to the rescue then! One of the contributors to waterscape.com has aleady produced a canal ice map which will read twitter tweets containing the tag #canalice. For once we seem almost ahead of the game! It needs some work to locate the tweets properly, but its the start of something very powerful. http://www.waterscape.com/blog/authors/chris/canal-ice
Maybe too late to become popular enough to be useful this week but it looks like we need to get used to the extreme conditions so let’s get used to updating each other too!
Join Twitter, send regular posts containing #canalice, a canal name and a location and lets see if we can make this thing take off!
“Mild weather keeps canal skaters off the ice” - CTV, Ottawa
Idly searching the net for news about canal conditions in the Midlands, I came upon this… at Ottawa’s television news channel online. Global warming redistribution?
Mild weather keeps canal skaters off the ice!
Waiting for the thaw
Sunday 3rd January 2010
I left Zulu in Brewood on Friday night, hoping somehow that this cold weather would be over within a couple of days, but it rather looks like it could be well over a week before the trip can be resumed with the weather still getting worse in places.
Sadly this means that I will miss my main deadline of reaching Braunston Tunnel cutting before 11th January, after which the canal is closed there until 5th March, unless BW can be persuaded to allow the occasional convoy of stranded boats to pass through. I will call them tomorrow to check if they have even managed to get their own boats in position before giving up totally.
Having left Zulu and headed south by road, I can confirm that the Newbury area Kennet and Avon is currently ice free, and whilst thick in places, the ice is certainly breakable all the way up to Crofton, as a couple of boats have made the trip over the weekend.
Such is the power of blogging though, a quick search of other canal blogs shows me that Great Haywood is mostly iced in according to Caxton’s blog, so I am thankful that I didn’t divert all the way up the Staffs and Worcester just to get stuck there, and Norbury Junction, which I passed through a couple of days earlier, has frozen again yesterday according to Debdale. Worse still, Epiphany tells us (and confimed today by email) that Birmingham centre is more or less impassable with 5 inch thick ice at Rotten Park. So even if I had forced my way to Wolverhampton it now seems likely I would now be stuck somewhere in no mans land instead of relatively cosy at Brewood. There are also a couple of threads running on Canalword.net forums where people are posting ice reports, and then of course there is twitter where Granny Buttons was encouraging the use of a #canalice tag to enable searching of relevant topics. This could form an invaluable facility if more people start using it - particularly useful as it can be checked and updated using mobile phones in real time. It is just as useful if people would also post “no ice” posts as well as reporting thick ice.
But right now on this lovely sunny afternoon down south, I have no way of knowing if conditions on the Birmingham Canal Main Line are changing or even if Brewood is deep in snow.
So if anyone can keep me updated on this I would really appreciate it and if anyone wants an update on the eastern Kennet and Avon then I will be only too happy to report back what I can.