Shrewley Tunnel and Hatton Lock Flight (canal timelapse)

Day 12: Starting at Lapworth Link, this canal journey takes us down a section of the Grand Union Canal Main Line, through the 433yd long Shrewley Tunnel and then down Hatton flight of locks - 21 locks in little over 2 miles of canal. To cap it all, it started raining too.

Photographs taken at 5 second intervals and then compiled into a video sequence.
Music by Blue Sky. This video is released under the Creative Commons License of free to share.

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Travel & Events

Tags:

• Grand
• Union
• Canal
• Main
• Line
• time
• lapse
• timelapse
• Hatton
• Flight
• locks
• Shrewley
• tunnel
• english
• waterways
• twitter

[galinneall]

Pretty cool! But it makes me wonder why they needed so many flights of locks - why couldn't they make some of the flights deeper and reduce the number of operations? Was it because of the terrain, or are there physical limits to the depth a lock can be?

Anyway, thanks for posting.

[0nix0]

Deeper locks take longer to fill, so more of a bottleneck with two way traffic

[OceanRailroader]

After seeing these videos I'm shocked at how many other narrow boats there are. Why didn't the canals go dry like in the US.

We did have a canal in Richmond that went from Richmond to the Kanawha River in Virginia in the 1870's.

It was called the James River & Kanawha Canal

If it hadn't of run out of money while they were building it they would have built a nine mile canal tunnel under the West Virginia State line from the James River to the Kanwha River

[0nix0]

There were 100's of canals, some of which have been filled in. The "Canal Age" was about 1760 to 1840, then railways came, then they were Nationalised. Post WWII there was a series of "abandonment" acts countered by volunteer IWA, and the rise of leisure activities since has meant vast improvements and reopening of some canals.

[OceanRailroader]

I noice on the British Canal Websites it looks like the Canals in England are coming back strongly. Do you think Narrow Boater could work on the US old canals?

[0nix0]

Hard to say. British Waterways was set up in the 60's to be funded by the taxpayer - doubt that could be repeated today without large support. Boating now a popular leisure activity, so much that groups are planning new waterways, but British Waterways still get their budget squeezed.

[KnowleOwl]

Great video - I was interested in seeing Shrewley Tunnel - as I want to kayak through it. I understand it takes two boats widths, will use a light and take a horn - any other advice? Cheers Knowle Owl

[madpanictv]

Great video, shame about the rain!! I assume you used something like after effects to create the graphic of the boat on the map? Thought that was a really nice touch.

[nhuymi]

Thanks guys, that was fun.

I once rowed from Worcester to Gloucester (with a crew). This included a couple of locks.

This seems far more relaxing !

[0nix0]

Yes, but not on my boat. Narrowboat's are quite easy to control. You could rent out a day boat to test it out - I rented a day boat from a company at Shipley years ago. Will allow you to potter around.