Narrowboats look so much like trains oh my god! Just saw a picture of a train partially sunk in a lake (???) and... wow yeah that could be a waterlogged canal boat.
It was the narrowboat Phyllis May. Nothing like her had ever been seen in these waters before, or anywhere else in the US. She was sixty feet long and six foot ten inches wide, grey and crimson and white, with long windows on the waterline. She looked like a sinking railway carriage. Near the stern, fairground letters a foot high β PHYLLIS MAY β T & M DARLINGTON, STONE.
- Narrow Dog to Indian River, in which a narrowboat that has crossed the English Channel is shipped to the USA to doodle around the South
Narrowboats and trains were developed around the same time in the same place for the same purpose, and competed for the same job (hauling cargo - early narrowboats were not for passengers.) narrowboats were ready to go as an easy technology - once you build the canal you can have as many little independent boats as will fit. They were pulled by horses at first, and didnβt look much like train carriages, being more like barges with a tarp over the cargo.
Narrowboats and trains paced each other for a short time, but trains were faster and more effective for passengers, so became ubiquitous. Narrowboats remained effective for slowly (and cheaply) shifting cargo around the inland British Isles.
One of the Peaky Blinders narrowboats, not too historically inaccurate for the 20s⦠by then they had engines. They were a very very slow way of moving cargo but they were still around in the 1920s because they still got it done.
In WW2, with fuel being rationed, there was a whole contingent of British women piloting cargo around the British Isles. This is a very slow way of doing it, but requires very little fuel to move a heavy load of cargo. Canals are fairly resilient infrastructure and boaters can largely be left to themselves without oversight or engineering. You can see that it was still a very small cabin at the stern with a woodstove for warmth and cooking, which is where the boaters kept their things and slept, and a huge long flat cargo area (the weird empty shell structure in front of the woman.) This would be covered with cargo and a top.
After WW2, the canals went into decline, with nobody maintaining them, and many collapsed. They almost vanished. Some are permanently lost, and a few others could be restored today. Interestingly, in terms of ecosystem and wildlife habitat, despite being artificial, canals are better than no canals.
In the 1970s there was a leisure revival brought around by a few keen people. They pointed out that the UKβs canal networks are good quality, well-connected and fun. It was only a handful of people but they restored the entire thing - locks, ducks and all.
Narrowboats built in the 1970s for leisure purposes went through a redesign. They immediately had the stern built in to make it into living quarters, like a long narrow camper van. This necessarily looks like a train!
Both trains and narrowboats are determined as narrow by the gauge of their infrastructure - trains to their tracks, and narrowboats to their locks.
Thus do narrowboats recapitulate their ancient rivals!
