Just a question - 3 parts to it

[Atarah]

Quick question - no time for photo just now. How observant are you all.
How many arches in our railway viaduct ... and one of the arches has a date on it. Which arch, and what date?

[Darby]

Originally Posted by Atarah

Quick question - no time for photo just now. How observant are you all.
How many arches in our railway viaduct ... and one of the arches has a date on it. Which arch, and what date?

Hang on, If you can wait 3 months I'll come over to Accy and have a look.

Nice question Atarah....( I haven't got a clue really)....Built in 1879?

[Tealeaf]

At a guess, 10 arches, 1846 on the 5/6th arch

[Mik Dickinson]

6 Arches and on the 3rd dated 1843, at a rough guess

[Darby]

1848 and 21 arches. I cheated...and looked it up!!!

[Atarah]

Ohhh Darby! You are correct! And there's no rules to say you can't look it up anyway, so well done. I never believed there actually were 21 arches, but ... its true! BUT, I am 100% sure the datestone says 1847 (its actually on the arch over King Street) - if anyone is passing, perhaps they could confirm the date.
See, I'll have you all knowing more about your town before I have finished!
Thinking cap on again now......

[Darby]

I know...wife says I'm a bad un.....as well.

I'll complain to Bob Dobson (Accrington Mixture) as he said the bridge was there when the railway came to Accy in 1848, so you may be right, it could well have been built in 1847 and not used until 1848. So Atarah, go to the top of the class.

It's all these books I bought about Accy, Ossy & Church...well, quite a few years ago now. But I've read them all. Great stuff..............in Accy you know and it's centre of the known Universe (well Church Commercial is to be accurate).

Any more this week??

[Atarah]

Have searched and searched to find something showing the 21 arches in our viaduct,and managed to find this....

[Tealeaf]

Thats a lovely old piccy there, Atarah. Possibly it gives a rather romantisised view of what Accy was like mid-century - especially for what was probably a southern audience in rhe mid 1840's. (Piccy published in the Illustrated London News, according to the caption)

However, that landscape could easily have looked very different. Fifty years before the railway came through Accy, a canal was planned to come through. As we now know, the Leeds/Liverpool canal skirts around Accy - unlike Blackburn or Burnley, where it goes straight through the middle. Why? Well, it all depends on what evidence or theory you wish to look at.

What is certain is that a canal was planned to run north from Manchester through the Rossendale Valley to meet up with the Leeds/Liverpool canal in the Accrington area. I have always understood that tihe canal would roughly follow the route of what eventually became the Accy/Bury railway line to the centre of Accy, then turn East & meet up with the Lds/Liv at Church (following what is now the Blackburn Road line)

I have recently read, though, that that junction was originally planned at a site corresponding with the Old Grammar School, and that the Lds/Liv would then have crossed the River Stink at approx. where the Asda is now, swung east and then through either a cutting or locks proceeded towards Burnley along the route roughly of what is Burnley Rd. (Either going throughby a cutting or going Up & Over by a series of locks). Whatever, this would still have encompessed the building of a substancial embankment downriver of where the railway viaduct stands.

So that little piccy - and Accy now - could perhaps have looked quite a bit different. Maybe we would have had a canal embankment running through the town (as in Burnley) as well as the great railway viaduct; and Accy would have looked very different ro what it does today....a canal where Blackburn road is, a huge embanking leading to the railway arches, maybe the town centre in the middle of it all....who knows

[Owd Bert]

Following on with Tealeaf`s comments about the once proposed Canal from Bury to Accy -- what a picture it conjures up in my mind. Of course the early Canal engineers such as Brindley made every effort to follow the contours to eliminate the need for expensive, and time wasting Locks. A good example is in this area. Look at the distance as the "crow-flies" from Bridge No 114A at Clayton to 108A at Rishton and then trace the actual route as it follows the contour.

However, back to the never built Bury-Accy Link. Had they consulted Brunel in the Mid-1800s ( yes, I know the railways were begining to take goods away from the Canals) just think what he may have proposed. On reaching Baxenden, instead of building umpteen Locks to drop down to about the Nuttall St I could imagine him boldly constructing a super long elevated Aqueduct and a then a mighty tall Barge Lift which would have put the Anderton Lift in the shade.

Had that come about, Accrington would have become the most visited place on the Canal Network and what with our Accy Stanley,Ossy Mills, New Town Centre etc. etc. we would have featured in the World`s Main Tour Guides.

[Tealeaf]

Well Bert,



There are several big “What If” questions there and the number of answers to those is invariably infinite. However, the idea of Brunel building canals through Accrington and applying 1840’s engineering solutions to the local topography is fascinating.



My understanding of the specifications of the canals built throughout England in the 1770’s through to the 1800’s is that they were constrained firstly, by the power source of the traffic they were designed for, i.e. the horse-pulled barge and the load limitation that this entailed, and secondly by the hesitation of various landowners to facilitate the passage of the canal over their land, hence the various compromises and cajoling to be found in the various Acts of Parliament legalising the construction of each canal. In sum, this meant that every canal constructed was wide enough to allow barges to pass in opposite directions and that the use of a lock or a “long route” round was not always determined by time logic but by who owned the land in the first instance.



And that is why there appears to be no straightforward answer to the question of “why doesn’t the canal go through Accrington? The guy who writes on the Blackburn Libraries website (www.cottontowns.org) says that the canal was initially planned to enter Accy and cross the Hyndburn “near the old Grammar School”…but I think he means roughly where the Asda is now. However, according to him, this route was vetoed by the Peel family because they feared “pollution” upstream of Peel Bank & hence it had to cross downstream of the Peel Works (which the writer correctly describes as one of the worlds largest industrial complexes at the time). However, I don’t accept the pollution argument – I think by this time the river would have been polluted upstream, anyway.



I think the real reason that the canal does a sharp 90 degree left-hander at Church is quite simply that the industrial complex – which was still under development – wanted a piece of the action. It wanted what modern politicians would now term “an integrated transport policy” combined with a “just in time” delivery policy. And that is exactly what it got – right up to and including it’s own branch of the canal leading directly into one of it’s own manufactories. The equivalent today would be to have a direct 6-lane link road going from the M65 directly into Express Gifts at Church (same site, by the way and the largest employer in Hyndburn)



The most logical route from Rishton, instead of making the 2 mile hairpin bend round Church through to Clayton would surely have been would surely have been to build an embankment over the river between the Rishton and a point halfway between Church and Clayton and then to continue along the hillside up from Hyndburn Road (i.e. roughly at the top part of Gatty/Milnshaw Park), and then to swing in the Burnley direction with a cutting & locks. O.K – I accept that transferring through Locks is a time laborious process, but it would still be quicker than doing the loop round Rishton/Clayton/Church – and Accy would have got it’s canal!



Once again, though, logic is overcome by power – this time the landowners of the Dunkenhalgh estate. There is no way they are going to have a canal embankment running right past their front door. In fact, this stuck up bunch of snobs even insist that the canal towpath is diverted on to the other side of the canal so that the Church riff-raff can’t come wandering down it pinching their rabbits! (Never stopped quite a few I know though). That’s why you have to go under & over the canal bridge at Church & why the next two bridges are swing bridges! For the Dunkenhalgh Estate, the canal almost becomes a moat.





So there we go. But lets just get back to Brunel. I think possibly if he had have been building in the 1840’s, and then the canals then would have been designed to accommodate steam power, so they would have been wider. Because construction techniques were better and because more money was available (there was no competition to finance the Napoleonic Wars), then they would have been far more radical in their use of cuttings & embankments. I think Accy would have got its canal then, but it would have been more like the Manchester Ship Canal coming through the centre of town.

Anyway, I've been writing this on the train, occaisionally looking out the window and glancing at the Grand Union Canal. Very nice - but not as nice as ours!

[Mick]

here is the pic you wanted hope it helps

[Mick]

I took these as well today

[Tealeaf]

Nowt Attached!

[Tealeaf]

OK....got 'em now