Rail track outside custom house, detail

Description Rail track outside custom house, detail

Date 18/9/2001

Collection Records of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), Edinbu

Catalogue Number SC 1935698

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of E 6479 CN

Scope and Content Rail track, Canal House Basin, Bowling Basin, Forth & Clyde Canal, West Dunbartonshire This shows railway tracks in front of the c.1800 Custom House and beside the 1790 Canal House Basin. These railway tracks were probably laid by the Lanarkshire & Dunbartonshire Railway and have been inset into the ground to reduce the risk of people tripping over them. Wagons would have moved along these tracks and tipped their contents into barges docked in the basin. At each side of the tracks and on the water front there are a pair of base plates which may have been the foundations for a crane or a wagon turntable. The Forth & Clyde Canal was built between 1768 and 1790. It could have been completed sooner but funds ran out in 1777 and more money was not found by the government until 1784. John Smeaton (1724-92) was the designer and first chief engineer for the project. He was replaced in 1777 by Robert Mackell (d.1779), and in 1785 Robert Whitworth (1734-99) took over the building of the final section of the canal from Glasgow. When the canal was completed in 1790 it ran from the River Forth at Grangemouth, in the east, to Bowling on the River Clyde in the west of Scotland. The canal was linked to Edinburgh when the Union Canal was opened in 1822. The Forth & Clyde Canal was closed in 1963 and the Union Canal in 1965 and the construction of new roads meant that it was impossible for boats to travel along the full length of these watercourses. However, the £84.5m Millennium Link project enabled the canals to reopen in 2002. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/1935698

File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap