Peter's Waterways Blog The Goat and the Swing Bridge This was first published in IWA West Riding's Milepost in November 2016, reporting on the navigational frustrations at Sykehouse Lock.

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The Goat

On our previous trip through Sykehouse Lock on the Aire and Calder and Sheffield and South Yorkshire New Junction Canal, a very long name for five miles of canal, we had been helped operate the structures by an apparently ownerless, and to judge by its protestations as we left, a lonely goat.

On our return to Sykehouse Lock this autumn, there was no return of the goat. But the lock still has the interminable and wholly unnecessary interlocking swing bridge across its middle. Most leisure boats can pass underneath without moving it, and the lock is big enough to always have the boat at the top side of the swing bridge when filling or emptying: when operating from the cabin, the mechanisms allow the bridge to be left in place while the boat does exactly that.

The boat occupies a small section of the lock

Sign directing crews to the next operation

Canal and River Trust when locking through their own craft from the cabin are therefore less affected by the bridge than are their customers using the pedestals and the complicated interlocking mechanism. It happened that we delayed a van on the wrong side for the full ten minutes of the lock cycle: they too are legitimate users of a C&RT structure who deserve a proper service.

A further update was published in IWA West Riding's Milepost in May 2017, that neither had C&RT nor any of our members told us of any progress on the operations at Sykehouse on the New Junction Canal (to use its shorter and more familiar title)

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Peter Scott @peterjohnscott