MSC Boxes

Reader's Letters & Queries: NarrowBoat, Summer 2011

As on the Gloucester & Sharpness Canal (Spring 2011 NB), dredgings on the rather larger Manchester Ship Canal were also carried in boxes, as is shown in these two postcard images. In the centre of each photograph is a box-laden dredgings float. These flat-decked craft seem to have been introduced in the early 1890s during the construction of the canal. Their boxes could be lifted ashore and conveyed to the spoil dump where they were inverted to empty them. The steam bucket-ladder dredgers (with the two white bands of the MSCCo on their funnels) are of the type that was built in the bed of the canal during its construction. A series of these machines was named after the various rivers that fed the Manchester Ship Canal such as Bollin, Irwell and Mersey. Euan Corrie, The Netherlands, by email…