Fill them with useless PE, and sink them to build either an airport, or the supports for his garden bridge to Ireland.

Green George wrote:

Can't find a good pic but perhaps BoZo will once again resurrect the "Grand Contour Canal", roughly along the 300' contour, lockless, capable of carrying 300 ton barges, and perhaps more important, feeding water from the Rain Mines of Llamedos to drier parts of the country? He toyed with it when Mayor of London, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Contour_Canal

GG, yes what a brilliant project. I was in the time thrilled by the Rhine-Danube connection, not only for the future development of "green" Europe, but also for its prestige. A waterway from the North Sea to the Black Sea. There was a lot of opposition as for the profitability and indeed in the Black Sea there are perhaps not that big economical entities. And at the end for the moment perhaps not a great performance, but perhaps with changing political circumstances with for instance Russia it can all rapidly change...I think...

GG, I have a good picture for the moment about the "Grand Contour Canal" and perhaps it will stay "unbuilt Britain', but I want to introduce it nevertheless in the "Waterways" thread. See you there.

Kind regards, Paul.

brenogler wrote:

PS this my hangout in Newcastle when I'm not in the pub:https://www.litandphil.org.uk/  If it were open.

Thank you Brenogler for your enlightenment about the Sage at Gateshead.

I did some rapid search for your hangout in Newcastle

https://www.litandphil.org.uk/about-us/

Even better than Bruges...you are spoiled in your city...perhaps after my next milestone of eighty...as I have such good rememberances about Newcastle and the Hadrian's Wall...some more extended journey...perhaps a direct flight then from Ostend to your city...

Kind regards, Paul.

Triceratops wrote:

The first stage of the Wembley Tower was actually built. Here photographed in 1900;

The Wembley Tower began being dismantled in 1904. The metal was sent to Italy for recycling with some believed to have been used in the construction of the Ponte di Caprigliola. Opened in 1908 the road bridge across the river Magra (by the boundary between Tuscany and Liguria) was one of the first bridges in the world to be built using reinforced concrete. Repaired following damage during the Second World War, it suddenly collapsed in 2020. Not to be confused with the Polcevera viaduct in nearby Genoa which collapsed in 2018 after 51 years, the Caprigliola bridge stood for 111 years.
   


(Futuristic-looking even while being built, it’s not clear whether the use of recycled steel in its construction played any significant part in the Caprigliola bridge’s ultimate collapse.)

At the same time as the Wembley Tower was being built, proposals were also being put forward for a railway tunnel under the Solent to link mainland Britain and the Isle of Wight. One even achieved parliamentary approval with a Railway (South Western & Isle of Wight Junction) Act being passed in 1901. The Ordnance survey 1906 edition duly marked the ‘proposed tunnel’ on its maps:



Construction was held-up for years, however, by legal challenges from rival railway and ferry companies. With the outbreak of the First World War the project was put on hold and then shelved in 1920 as a result of the Geddes axe.

Plans to connect the Isle of Wight to the mainland - whether via a tunnel or a bridge - have cropped up nearly every decade or so for over 150 years - the latest plan is for a Gosport to Ryde tunnel as part of a wider Southampton-Portsmouth tram/metro network, but that too now seems to have foundered due to lack of finance. Even before the planned Milford to Yarmouth tunnel of the 1900s that you've mentioned above, there were, in about the 1880s, at least two other proposals: one was for a tunnel running from Lepe (a coastal hamlet near Beaulieu in the New Forest) across to Cowes, and the other was to run from Stokes Bay (just south of Gosport) to Ryde. This second one was a bit unusual as at the suggestion of Field-Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley it was proposed to connect the tunnel to a massive seafort which would be built at about the tunnel's midpoint. This fort was to provide ventillation for the tunnel - always an issue when using stream trains - but would supposedly serve to bolster the defences of the Solent's eastern approach and so protect the naval base at Portsmouth. And of course the inclusion of a fort in the plans for the cross-solent tunnel was also a blatant attempt to try and get the government to pay half the tunnel's costs. This seafort I assume would have been somewhat in the manner of the Nab Tower that was built during WW1 as an anti-submarine fort but whose only function now is as the base for a lighthouse, and that is only necessary because the massive Nab Tower itself is a hazard to shipping.

As far as I'm aware both of these Victorian tunnel proposals progressed at least as far as digging exploratory shafts at each end, but after these initial trial works the projects just seem to have fizzled out never to be heard of again. In the late 19th century excavating a tunnel under the Solent - a distance of about 2 to 6 km depending on the projected route - would certainly have been technically challenging, but not excessively so given that a 2km long, twin-bore, railway tunnel under estuary of the River Mersey between Birkenhead to Liverpool had been completed in 1886 ... and which continues to carry rail traffic to this day.

That the proposed Milford to Yarmouth tunnel was included on the 1906 OS map suggests a good degree of confidence that the project was going ahead. So what changed for everything to be abandoned within just a few years?

I've also found this 1920 map which seems to suggest, not just a proposal but the very existence of a rail bridge across the western end of the Solent, thereby connecting the London to Weymouth mainline, via the junction at Brockenhurst, to the Isle of Wight's rail network. However this looks like it is just an over-optimistic repeat of the OS map's inclusion of the proposed pre-war tunnel. It also appears to show the line from the mainland simply terminating at Freshwater, rather than more sensibly having a loop to allow trains to continue on to the main west-east line to the island's principal towns of Newport, Cowes and Ryde, and onwards to the main holiday resorts along the south-east coast. The map was printed in 1920 by James and Findlay Muirhead as part of their Blue Guide series of visitors' guidebooks and so was intended as 'just' a tourist guide. The book covered the whole of England but as can be seen from the IOW map it nevertheless still went into considerable local detail, although perhaps the information it gave was not always completely accurate.