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Goole Tom Puddings make historic journey to Leeds Waterfront Festival
RESTORED Tom Puddings from a Goole museum are today heading to Leeds for the first time in 30 years to take part in the Waterfront Festival.
The historic sailing will see the units from Dutch Riverside-based Waterways Museum travel along the Aire and Calder canal, skippered by its Weldale crew.
Museum Officer Rachel Walker said: "The Wheldale crew are very excited about bringing the Tom Puddings to Leeds.
"This will be the Tom Puddings first outing along the Aire and Calder Navigation since their conservation last year, and the first time any Tom Puddings have been as far as Leeds in 30 years.
"It has taken years of careful restoration by Museum volunteers to get the tug, Jebus and Tom Puddings to a standard that they can be towed, so this outing is a real landmark journey for everyone involved."
As the last remaining type of their kind, this railway on the water was unique to the Aire and Calder Navigation and operated for 125 years until finally ending in 1986.
During the industrial revolution huge amounts of coal were needed to power industry throughout Britain and Northern Europe.
Transporting such a heavy and bulky cargo was made much easier when two navigations which meet in Wakefield, the Aire & Calder and Calder & Hebble navigations, were opened in the 18th century.
However, loading and unloading coal from boats by hand was slow and gruelling work.
After the 1840s, railways offered a faster, cheaper means of moving coal so the navigation companies responded by inventing a way to move large amounts of coal quickly and cheaply.
In 1862 waterway engineer, William H Bartholomew's answer was to design the Tom Puddings.
Trains of up to 38 Tom Puddings, or flat bottomed floating containers, would be linked together and loaded forming a canal train at Yorkshire coal mines and would be towed by tugs to Goole Docks.
To speed up the loading of boats they would be lifted by one of five hydraulic hoists and the coal tipped into ships to be transported to other British ports and all around Europe.
Each train of Tom Puddings could transport around 800 tons of coal and be moved by just four men to gasworks, power stations, mills, coal merchants and on to Goole where it was loaded into ships.
In windy weather the Tom Puddings would sometimes snake across the canal making it difficult for other boats to pass.
Judy Jones, heritage advisor for British Waterways said: "It's fantastic news that the waterways museum is able to bring along such an important piece of living history and the project to restore them has been so successful.
"They're a unique early example of canal transport and one that most people probably won't be aware of, so it's great that they can be brought to life at an event held in Leeds – an area which has so much significance to the heritage of the Tom Puddings."
In front of the leading loaded 'Tom Pudding', it became standard practice to have a false bow unit, which was also used as a towing piece, known as a Jebus.
The Jebus's main function was to separate the water pushed back from the tug's propeller, to prevent the water building up against the first loaded Tom Pudding.
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Weather for Goole
Friday 25 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 20 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
