Keadby

Here I am Rune

Distance 9.8 miles

Total 1341 Locks 70 Tunnels

Running total mileage 1911.7 miles 

Ah, the luxury of being able to change our mind on a whim! We were going to stay at Thorne today and travel to Keadby tomorrow to catch the tide on Wednesday but, looking at the weather forecast for tomorrow we decided to head for Keadby today since tomorrow is forecast to be overcast with a 20% chance of rain. Instead we’ll kick around in Keadby for a day (we’ve already been told by people who seem to know that there is nothing here!) and still set off up the River Trent on Wednesday. 

I called the lock-keeper and booked a passage through the lock on Wednesday, he told me that the time to go through to get to West Stockwith on slack water will be about 9.30am, this is a bit later than I had calculated however it is probably better to get there a bit late rather than a bit early since, if the ebb tide has started it is still possible to get into West Stockwith lock but if the flood is still running it is necessary to try to turn around before trying to get into the lock.

Just before we reached Keadby there is an interesting anomaly on the canal, a sliding railway bridge (photo attached but it doesn’t really give a full impression of how it all works). Speaking with the signalman in the adjacent box he thinks that it may be the only sliding railway bridge in the world. There were apparently three in Europe but he thinks that the other two have now been adapted to operate in a different fashion.

The sliding railway bridge....

.......showing the part of the lines that separate

The final few miles on this canal seems to be very well choked with weed and, on arrival at Keadby I went down the weedhatch and removed several handfuls of weed (which is a bit of a novelty, to go down the weedhatch and come up with weed rather than the usual plastic bags!!).