Friday Night Steam

How about steaming down a canal?? 

Unique sight of various steamboats on the Coventry Canal taking part in the annual Coventry Boat Rally, June 2014.


COVENTRY hosted the largest gathering of steam powered canal boats for a generation this weekend.
And experts say it could be the biggest flotilla of steam-driven narrowboats ever seen.
There are only 18 of the boats in the country and 10 of them came to Coventry to journey from Sutton Stop at Hawkesbury Junction on Saturday down to the Canal Basin yesterday.
The gathering was a celebration of a labour of love by Coventry engineer Keith Ward.
Keith, of Meriden Street, Coundon, has just finished building a reproduction 1870s steam boat at Swan Lane Wharf in Upper Stoke.
And to mark the occasion, fellow steam boat fanatics, came from across the country to admire “Hasty”, which was launched last year but has only now been finally finished on its first birthday.
Keith, an engineer at Coventry firm Brett Martin, said: “There are only 18 of these boats in the country so we’ve got more than half of them here this weekend, which is quite remarkable.
“There are quite a range of different boats and they all look quite unusual.
“Some look like standard boats but some look very odd indeed.”
The boats came from as far afield as North Yorkshire, with one having recently appeared on TV as part of the Royal Jubilee flotilla on the Thames.
Keith said: “These boats are very expensive to run and very difficult to handle so they’re a very specialist thing.
“It takes an hour to warm them up before they get moving.
“As an engineer by trade I like working with machines and for me, this is just like a big boy’s toy!”
The boats included an eco-friendly family home, run on biofuel, which travels the length of the country with the children aboard.
President, a boat built in Birmingham in 1909 tours the region’s canals in the summer promoting its home, the Black Country Living Museum, and the waterways in general.
There was also a 35-foot ice-breaker from 1830 named Laplander.
Keith said: “That one’s referred to as a “slug on a cocktail stick” because it has a 12-foot funnel coming out of the top which is almost half its length.”
He added: “People have a lot of interest in Coventry Canal but they tend to go straight past.
“It’s five-and-a-half miles so it’s half a day out of your trip to come down to the Canal Basin.
“So we thought we’d bring a bit of life to the Basin this weekend.”
Keith has hopes of launching a Coventry Canal Festival in the future.

Source: http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/party-steam-narrowboats-floats-coventry-3023539









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