Lock 1 - 18

Progress continues to go well at the lock 10 (Ashton Canal) stoppage.

The gates are fitted and saw gated, the cills are in and we are at the stage where we are fitting the original metal balance beams back and attaching the gearing. That will leave the large tail gate fenders to be fitted plus some general demobilising work. 

There will be an engineering inspection of the fitted gates at the end of the day on Friday. Provided that goes well we will start to demobilise the site – remove scaffolding and so on on Saturday. Realistically it will only be late on Saturday that we will be in a position to reopen the flight. With that in mind and given our general advice about cruising on the Ashton Canal we will reopen the flight first thing on Sunday morning.

We thank you for your patience while we have been carrying out this work.

First our apologies for not providing the promised update yesterday.

Over the weekend we took delivery of the new lock gates as planned and have been able to install them.  They were saw gated yesterday which was a great achievement on gates that are 6m tall.

Today we have started to replace the cills.

Everything is progressing to plan.  We will give a further update later in the week but currently expect to be able to reopen the canal towards the end of Saturday 26th July.

We are expecting to take delivery of the new gates needed for Lock 10 next Saturday (19th) and should be able to start fitting them straight away. We expect that it will take a week to complete that which will include fitting new cills and are hopeful of being able to reopen the canal over the weekend of 26th/27th July. In the coming week we will be setting up the site and making all other preparations needed ready to receive the gates.  There is a lot that needs to come together this week so we are not being definite about a reopening date at this point, and will give a further update next Monday.

If you are waiting for this work to be completed and wishing to carry on a journey as soon as the canal does reopen, we would be grateful if you could contact our Red Bull office and let us know. We are keen to plan for the volume of traffic that may be in the area as the canal reopens and want that to go as smoothly as possible.

Please contact Ellie or Milly at Red Bull on 0303 040 4040

Please see the below update which was issued yesterday.

Update to Emergency Stoppage of 2nd July

The tail gates at Lock 10 have been inspected this morning to try and determine if there is a simple repair needed or replacement is required.  While it is not clear yet which option is chosen, we do know that the gates will have to be removed and transported to one of our workshops, we cannot just repair on site.

We are starting the process of mobilisation to do this, there is a lot that needs to be put in place at this difficult to access lock before we can do that. 

Clearly this is going to take some time.  While we cannot be definite about the repair programme we believe that the lock will be unusable for at least the next couple of weeks.

We appreciate that lack of clarity is frustrating at this point and will provide a much more definite programme as soon as we are able.

It is not certain what the cause of this failure is, a photograph is included on our website noticeboard at this link http://canalrivertrust.org.uk/media/library/6677.pdf of the damage for information.  The gate is only 20 years old and the damage is in an unexpected location.

Part of our work now will be to understand the cause and we will update on this as the investigation develops.

There is a problem with the tail gate at lock 10 which is preventing the lock from operating.  Our engineers are investigating the problem and we will publish an update tomorrow morning at 10am.

As there is nowhere to moor between lock 1 – 18, we have closed the entire flight and advise customers to moor in Portland Basin or Piccadilly Basin.