Competition and decline
The steam engine has a strange relationship with the canals. Coal carried on narrowboats fueled those early engines and as the engines became more sophisticated, their use expanded and the demand for coal increased.
Some of these early steam engines were used to pump water from rivers to feed aqueducts, like the steam engine at the Crofton pumping station on the Kennet and Avon, which began working in 1809 while Jane Austen was still alive.
By 1825, however, the Stockton & Darlington Railway was using steam locomotives to haul coal and soon the rapidly expanding railways saw the canals as competition. So companies like the Great Western Railway actually bought canals like the Kennet & Avon, increasing tolls on the K&A to make it less competitive and instituted the 4 mph speed limit narrowboaters still observe today.
The Great Western Railway wanted to stop the fly-boats and swift-boats on the K&A, which carried passengers at the breakneck speed of 10 mph. Most boats had obeyed the 4 mph speed limit (a brisk walking pace) to prevent leaving a wake that could erode canal banks. But swift-boats pulled by horses traveled on a standing wave that traveled with the boats, leaving little wake and offering little resistance.
In some cases the railways were required to maintain the canals they owned because of the royal assents that had created those canals, but in actual practice the canals would be neglected to the point of becoming unusable. Occasionally, however, a railway had a vested interest in maintaining a canal if that canal competed against a rival railway.
Some canal companies responded to competition by slashing their tolls while others tried to reinvent as railway companies. Cruelly the canals had transported a lot of the coal and timber that had helped build the railways and the same navvies (called that because they first worked on navigations—rivers improved to make them navigable) who had built the canals now worked on the railways. And as canal companies collapsed, canal beds would be turned into railroad beds.
Nevertheless the canal system survived into the twentieth century. During World War II, transportation by canal was still so important that when boatmen were called to service, women volunteers were taught to operate narrowboats for the Inland Waterways Department. Because of the initials “IW” on their work clothes, the older boatmen still working called them “idle women.”
Even the canals that had fallen out of use were still important to the war effort as they were a ready made barrier to a feared German invasion. Pillboxes and tank traps were built alongside canals and you can still see them on the Kennet & Avon, the Basingstoke, the Leeds & Liverpool, the Stroudwater, the Bridgewater & Taunton and other canals. They were part of the GHQ line and would have been defended by the Home Guard—“Dad’s Army.”
The Royal Military Canal along the Kent coast predates the GHQ line. It was created to foil another would-be invader—Napoleon Bonaparte. Although never intended to carry boat traffic, barges operated on the Royal Military Canal until 1909.
Time, however, was not on the side of the canals. After the railroads taking business from the canals came the motorways. The death knell was the Great Freeze of 1962-1963 when the canals iced over. Boats were stuck with the goods they carried for weeks. Any remaining business went to road and rail transport. The canals were left to disintegrate.