2597 x 3366 px | 22 x 28,5 cm | 8,7 x 11,2 inches | 300dpi
Aufnahmedatum:
1890
Ort:
Manchester, Lancashire, England, UK
Weitere Informationen:
Navvies (construction workers) loading extracted material using a steam digger ('steam navvy') on to railway waggons during the excavation of the Manchester Ship canal, Lancashire, England, UK, c. 1890. Temporary rail tracks assisted in the removal of spoil from the route of the canal. Navvy, a shorter form of navigator or navigational engineer, describes the manual labourers that worked on major civil engineering projects. The term was coined in the late 18th century in Great Britain when numerous canals were being built – and later during the Victorian railway-bulding era. Workmen were employed on cutting out the bed of the canals, building bridges, tunnels, cuttings and embankments mostly using hand tools, supplemented with explosives. Steam-powered mechanical diggers or excavators (initially called 'steam navvies') were used later in the 19th century. The Manchester Ship Canal is 36 miles long (58 km) inland waterway linking Manchester to the Irish Sea. Starting at the Mersey Estuary near Liverpool, several sets of locks lift vessels about 60 feet (18 m) up to the canal's terminus at Manchester. It was proposed as a bill presented to Parliament in 1882 as way of giving ocean-going vessels direct access to Manchester. Construction began in 1887 and took six years. When the ship canal opened in 1894 it was the largest river navigation canal in the world, and enabled the newly created port of Manchester to become Britain's third busiest despite its inland location. Ships eventually became too big to use the canal and traffic declined, resulting in the closure of the terminal docks at Salford. Although by 2011 freight traffic had decreased from its peak in 1958 of 18 million long tons of freight each year to about 7 million long tons, the canal carries large quantities of oil and container cargo.
