Lancaster Canal Tramroad - The Tramroad

The Tramroad

In 1794, the canal company engaged the services of William Cartwright, first to supervise the construction of the foundations for the Lune Aqueduct and later as Resident Engineer. John Rennie and William Jessop were the chief engineers to the company, but such was the demand for their services at this time of Canal Mania that they were much in demand elsewhere and Cartwright was solely responsible for the construction of the tramroad. His house in Preston is still extant and now forms the façade of a new shopping arcade.

The five-mile-long tramroad comprised a double-track plateway, except for a short section of single track through a tunnel under Fishergate in Preston, just south of the canal basin. The iron rails were ‘L’ shaped in section and were spiked to large limestone blocks. The wheels on the waggons were not flanged and it was the vertical section on the iron rails that kept the wheels on the track. The gauge was 4 foot 3 inches (1295 mm) between the verticals, which were on the inside of the track.

The waggons were pulled by horses, up to six at a time, and each waggon had a capacity of two tons. Originally there were three inclined planes where the waggons were hauled via stationary steam engines and a continuous chain.

The tramroad crossed the River Ribble on a timber trestle bridge. This structure outlived the tramroad by nearly one hundred years and was replaced by a precast concrete structure to the same design in the 1960s (Engineering Timelines, 2007).

As was common on early ‘railway’ systems, the waggons could be privately owned by the hauliers themselves (known locally as halers) who paid the company a toll to use the tramroad. There were many accidents during the life of the tramroad, many involving the inclined planes with waggons running away.

The last haler to work the tramroad, John Procter, walked the 10-mile return journey twice a day for 32 years. It has been estimated (Barritt, 2000) that he walked or rode nearly 200,000 miles (300,000 km) during his career on the tramroad, and needed his clogs resoling one per week.