CHERTSEY

BOATS, BRIDGES, BOILERS ... IF IT'S GOT RIVETS, I'M RIVETTED
... feminist, atheist, autistic academic and historic narrowboater ...
Likes snooker, beer, tea, rivets and solitude, and is strangely fascinated by the cinema organ.
And there might be something about railways.
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Thursday 4 February 2010

Unidentified Floating Objects

No, nothing nasty.

When I went through all my photos looking for ones to put in the album, I found a few likely candidates that I couldn't put a name to. One was only from last summer - I suspect it didn't have its name on or I would have remembered, but I've just zoomed in on its BW index number, looked it up on Jim Shead, and assuming his entry is accurate, identified it as Ascot. So woo, another one I didn't know I had!

But this one, badly photographed in 2006 still has me guessing... Ideas anyone?

7 comments:

  1. Hi Sarah,
    This is a photo of a big Woolwich butty on the outside, painted blue and yellow and a small Woolwich motor on the inside painted just blue. I am almost sure that the motor is Aquilla and the butty is my old butty Bingley, and are usually moored around Stockton.

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  2. Ah, thank you. I thought the big one might be a butty from other, even worse, photos taken as I passed. But how did you tell from the front? (Especially in such a dreadful picture)

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  3. Paul NB Capricorn5 February 2010 at 16:57

    Actually I think they're Darley and Alperton - both big Woolwiches.
    http://www.workingboats.org.uk/boats/darley.aspx

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  4. Hmm.. The thing is, I photographed Darley, also in August 2006, on the Trent and Mersey, and, I think, looking a bit smarter than this. The other thing is, doesn't Darley have a distinctive 'scar' where the fore end was re-attached? I know this is a bad photo but I can't see any sign of it. I'd love it to be Alperton of course but it looked like a small to me - otherwise I might have been tempted to think it was Aldgate and Angel.

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  5. Paul NB Capricorn6 February 2010 at 08:01

    Sorry Sarah, I'm still convinced! You photographed them from the other end on the same occasion.
    http://townclassalbum.blogspot.com/2010/01/135-darley.html

    The ropework and "rockets" on Darley's deck board are very distictive as are the diamond painted uprights behind the cratch. Also the trees and the neighbouring boat are the same.

    Alperton has the distinctive extra guard on the bow which BW added to many of the Town Class Boats (AFAIK to none of the Stars) and the reason it looks a smaller boat is simply the bow isn't cocked in the air by the weight of an engine.

    The boats have sadly gone rather downhill since Roger died. But that's the thing with boats - unless you keep at them they go into a steady decline.

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  6. OOps, sorry Sarah, Paul's right, it is Darley and Alperton. I was simply going from paintwork on the bows knowing that Aquilla is just blue while Bingley's bows are blue and yellow. Put it down to senile dementure.

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  7. Yes Paul, you are right, sorry. I've gone back to the photos again and they are part of the same sequence. Somewhere though I have another one - which is what confused me - which I thought was part of that sequence but wasn't. Discount anything I wrote last night; it took me four hours to get from Victoria to Newhaven and I was a bit frazzled.

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