Operation
Coal came from the Radstock and Paulton mines in the Somerset coalfield by way of the Somersetshire Coal Canal, which joined the Kennet and Avon Canal at Dundas. In 1837 43,642 tons of coal were transported via the Wilts & Berks Canal from the Somerset coalfield, with 10,669 tons being handled at Abingdon wharf. The Wilts and Berks thus became a link in the chain of canals providing a transportation route between the West Country and the Midlands. Water supply was always a problem and a reservoir was constructed near Swindon to supply the canal, now known as Coate Water.
The Wilts & Berks Canal was never a great commercial success due to competition from the railways, especially the Great Western Railway from 1841. In addition, long stretches of the canal were through a type of clay that is unsuitable for lining a canal, and so there was a constant need for puddling, making maintenance costs prohibitive. Despite this, the Wilts & Berks Canal operated for more than a century, through traffic had pretty much ceased by 1901. In that year the Stanley Aqueduct over the River Marden collapsed; an event that proved to be the death knell of the canal.
Read more about this topic: Wilts & Berks Canal
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. The only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of “Wut,” is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)