Foxton Inclined Plane, Grand Union Canal, Leicestershire
Sir Edward Leader Williams’ Anderton Boat Lift (1875) in Cheshire successfully enabled canal boats to move between the River Weaver and the Trent & Mersey Canal, a vertical distance of fifty feet. Despite problems with maintenance it worked efficiently for over a century, and after a radical overhaul in 2000-02 it’s now likely to operate for another hundred years.
A completely different, less fortunate engineering solution to the same difficulty was tried in the Midlands, on the border between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire near Market Harborough.
The engineers who built the old Grand Union Canal at the beginning of the nineteenth century faced a similar situation at Foxton, where their main line climbed 75ft from a junction with a branch canal to Market Harborough up to the summit level.
The solution was a staircase of ten locks, opened in 1813, which took narrow boats forty-five minutes to travel. At the other end of the summit pound, at Watford Gap, another flight of locks dropped 54ft 1in.
In 1894 the Grand Junction Canal company amalgamated with the old Grand Union and the Leicestershire & Northamptonshire canals to operate the trunk route between Leicestershire and London as a single entity.
It still seemed practical at the end of the nineteenth century to compete with the railways for bulk, non-urgent freight traffic, using broad barges, provided the bottlenecks at the narrow locks at Foxton and Watford were eliminated.
The Grand Junction engineer Gordon Cale Thomas devised and patented a steam-powered lift that drew tanks, called caissons, laterally up a ramp between the top and bottom of the old locks: Foxton Inclined Plane – Foxton Inclined Plane – Wikipedia.
This device, which opened in 1900, had numerous advantages: each caisson could carry two wide barges between the two levels in twelve minutes and, whereas canal locks lose a lockful of water whenever a boat passes up or down, the lift lost hardly any water at all.
The disadvantages were that the winding engines had to be kept constantly in steam whether there was traffic or not, and there turned out to be insufficient traffic to justify the ongoing cost.
Perversely, the canal company chose to rebuild the Watford locks as narrow locks, simply moving the bottleneck further south and leaving the Foxton incline underused. A boat lift at Watford would have speeded up traffic dramatically, and may have yielded better cost benefits.
Because the main carrier, Fellows Morton & Clayton, demanded twenty-four-hour working, Foxton Locks was rebuilt, also as narrow locks, in 1909 and the incline was mothballed after ten years. It was used intermittently when the locks needed repair until it was scrapped in 1928.
Its site was abandoned for nearly half a century until it was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1973, and the Foxton Inclined Plane Trust was founded in 1980.
Nowadays the site of the ramp is cleared and the scale of this sophisticated piece of Victorian canal engineering is apparent to visitors. The reconstructed boiler-house is a museum which explains the vanished incline and the Trust intends eventually to restore the lift.
It won’t happen any time soon, but the Trust is actively curating the site and maintaining public awareness of a fascinating corner of the canal network: https://www.fipt.org.uk/copy-of-about-fipt.