History
When the Wyrley and Essington Canal was authorised by Act of Parliament in 1792, it was for a canal from the coal fields of Wyrley and Essington to the north of Bloxwich to the urban centre of Wolverhampton, with a branch to Walsall, ending near the present Birchills Junction. However, the company obtained a second Act in 1794, before the original canal was completed, which authorised an extension eastwards from Birchills, passing through Pelsall to reach more collieries at Brownhills, close to Catshill Junction, and on to the site of Ogley Junction, from where it would descend through thirty locks to reach Huddlesford Junction, to the east of Lichfield. Huddlesford Junction was effectively part of the Coventry Canal, but that section had been built by the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal in a complicated agreement to ensure that the Birmingham and Fazeley would be part of a larger network, and therefore more likely to be profitable. The Birchills Branch became part of the main line, and the former main line to Wyrley Bank became a branch.
The 1794 Act also authorised a number of branches, including one to serve limeworks at Hay Head. This was known as the Daw End Branch, and left the main line at Catshill Junction. The whole of the main line was completed in 1797, but there were problems with water supply, compounded by the failure of the reservoir dam at Sneyd in 1799. These were resolved in 1800 with the completion of the Chasewater Reservoir, which fed water into the canal at Ogley Junction, via a navigable feeder called the Anglesey Branch. The Hay Head branch and hence the junction was also opened in that year. Despite the fact that the limestone quarries which the junction and branch served were described as "on a very extensive plan, inexhaustible as quantity, and of very superior quality", they were unused by 1809, resulting in less traffic using the junction, but were back in business by 1822. The junction saw increased traffic after 1847, when the Rushall Canal linked the southern end of the branch to the Tame Valley Canal. It was one of several links between the Wyrley and Essington Canal and the Birmingham Canal Navigations system, built following the amalgamation of the two companies in 1840.
Read more about this topic: Catshill Junction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.”
—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)