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STRUCTURES/INFRASTRUCTURE
DAVID SHIRRES
C
anals were a real problem for the early railway builders, as is illustrated by the steep gradients on the approaches to Euston and King’s Cross, where the railway was built respectively over and under the Regent’s Canal. The Midland Railway avoided this problem by building an elevated station at St Pancras. In Scotland, the Monklands canal forced the Edinburgh to Glasgow railway to build a tunnel with a 1 in 41 gradient to reach its Glasgow Queen Street terminus whilst various bridges and tunnels were needed to cross the Forth and Clyde canal which cut across central Scotland. It could have been worse if Robert Stephenson, of lighthouse fame, had had his way. In 1817, Stephenson proposed a level canal between Glasgow and Edinburgh. This was to have a basin where Edinburgh Waverley station is now, following the line of what was to be the railway through Princess Street gardens to Haymarket and then continuing along the 155-foot contour to join the Forth and Clyde canal at its summit pound, seven miles west of Falkirk, which extends to Port Dundas in Glasgow. A canal without any locks between Scotland’s two main cities was a commercially attractive proposition for both passengers and freight. However, there was a snag – it required the construction of a three-mile-long two-way canal tunnel at Winchburgh. The costs and risks of such a tunnel were too much for the canal’s promoters, who chose Hugh Baird’s line to build the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal, which opened in 1822. A swift passenger boat was then introduced that took eight hours between the two cities and carried 200,000 passengers a year.
Rail Engineer | Issue 186 | September/October 2020
The Union Canal is a level canal that follows the 240-foot contour from Fountainbridge in Edinburgh to Falkirk. There, it joined the Forth and Clyde canal by a flight of 11 locks, which were demolished in the 1930s. The Millennium Link restored these two canals and, in 2002, re-joined them by the Falkirk Wheel, which is Scotland’s 15th most visited tourist attraction. When the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway opened in 1842, it took away all of the canal’s passenger traffic and much of its freight traffic. Eventually, in 1849, the railway took over the whole Union Canal. Evidence of this common
