Decline
The Eastern Counties Railway reached Chelmsford in 1843, and a branch line from Witham reached Maldon in 1848, but there was never a direct line between the two towns. Although trade declined, the impact of the railways was less significant than on many canals. Following the Second World War, the sea lock into Heybridge Basin was extended to 107 by 26 feet (33 by 7.9 m), so that coasters carrying timber from the continent could enter the basin to transfer their cargo to barges. Traffic slowly declined until the last load of timber was delivered to Browns Yard (now Travis Perkins) on Springfield Basin in 1972. Although commercial traffic ceased, the navigation continued to derive income from water abstraction and from the sale of wood from the willows which grow along the banks. The willow is used for making cricket bats, and the trees were first planted in the 1880s when one of the directors saw the need for alternative sources of income.
The navigation is unusual in that it was not nationalised in 1948 when most of the other waterways in the UK were, and remained under the control of the original Company of Proprietors of the Chelmer & Blackwater Navigation Ltd.
Read more about this topic: Chelmer And Blackwater Navigation
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
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—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)