20th December 2018
During the summer, Barbara Milton, our Planning Officer and a member of our Engineering Group, approached Nottingham Trent University to see whether they would be willing to help in a design for a proposed iconic boat lift at Rother Valley. David Russhard, Civil Engineering Course Leader at NTU, agreed to take this on as a final year project for their M.Eng. students.
As part of the new restoration route through Killamarsh, the canal will go into Nethermoor Lake. To get out of the lake and back up to the original route, it will need to climb over 20 metres in a very short distance. The current proposal is to do this with six locks, each over 3m deep, including a quintuple staircase.
Whilst this would be a magnificent spectacle, it would use very large amounts of water and take a long time to traverse.
The alternative is a boat lift or inclined plane, such as the Falkirk Wheel, the Anderton Boat Lift or the Foxton Inclined Plane. This could prove to be a major tourist attraction.
The students were given a brief in October and visited the canal, including a site visit and further briefing, on 7th November. They split into three groups.
On 22nd November, each group gave an optioneering presentation of three different ideas before a panel of NTU lecturers, Derbyshire County Council engineers and Trust members.
Based upon comments made by this panel and their own ideas, each group then picked one of their proposals to work on further.
On 13th December, each group gave a 30 minute presentation of their final ideas to a similarly constituted panel.
It was then the job of the panel to pick a winning design. This was extraordinarily difficult because all three proposals were really exciting, were very well thought out and were very well presented.
The winning design was the Crown, presented by Greg Chalklin, Alex Hooper, Byron Richards and Dan Williams.
To see a video of their presentation, click here. Some of their design ideas are illustrated below.
Another design, proposed by Curtis Pearson, Harry Mark and Minhang Rai, was for a Rotating Wheel Lift. To see their presentation, click here.
A further design, presented by Akaash Parekh, Om Savarkar and Michaela Le, was a Caisson Boat lift. To see their presentation, click here. To see their drawings, click here.
They also had five videos:
For an overview of the boat lift, click here.
For the site set up, click here.
To see the sheet piling, click here.
For the aqueduct construction, click here.
For the visitor centre construction, click here.
Is that the end of it? We most certainly hope not. We want this to happen. We will be taking these ideas to various organisations and Waterways World are hoping to do a major piece about it in a future issue.
In the meanwhile, we are hugely grateful to NTU, David Russhard and Hynda Klalib, but above all to Greg Chalklin, Alex Hooper, Michaela Le, Harry Mark, Akaash Parekh, Curtis Pearson, Minhang Rai, Byron Richards, Om Savarkar and Dan Williams.
