page_title: Lancaster Canal Tramroad
section_title: The tramroad
hierarchical_section_title: Lancaster Canal Tramroad / The tramroad
caption_attribution_description: English: The Old Tram Bridge across the Ribble in Preston, Lancashire, England. This is a 1960s concrete replica of a wooden trestle bridge that once carried the Lancaster Canal Tramroad across the river.
context_page_description: The Lancaster Canal Tramroad, also known as the Walton Summit Tramway or the Old Tram Road, was a plateway, completed in 1803, to link the north and south ends of the Lancaster Canal across the Ribble valley, pending completion of the canal. The canal link was never constructed.
context_section_description: In 1794, the canal company engaged the services of William Cartwright, first to supervise the construction of the foundations for the Lune Aqueduct and later as Resident Engineer. John Rennie and William Jessop were the chief engineers to the company, but such was the demand for their services at this time of Canal Mania that they were much in demand elsewhere and Cartwright was solely responsible for the construction of the tramroad.  His house in Preston is still extant and now forms the façade of a new shopping arcade.
  The five-mile-long tramroad comprised a double-track plateway, except for a short section of single track through a tunnel under Fishergate in Preston, just south of the canal basin.  The iron rails were ‘L’ shaped in section and were spiked to large limestone blocks.  The wheels on the wagons were not flanged and it was the vertical section on the iron rails that kept the wheels on the track.  The gauge was 4 foot 3 inches (1295 mm) between the verticals, which were on the inside of the track.
  The wagons were pulled by horses, up to six at a time, and each wagon had a capacity of two tons.  Originally there were three inclined planes where the wagons were hauled via stationary steam engines  and a continuous chain.
  The tramroad crossed the River Ribble on a timber trestle bridge.  This structure outlived the tramroad by nearly one hundred years and was replaced by a precast concrete structure to the same design in the 1960s.
  There were many accidents during the life of the tramroad, many involving the inclined planes with wagons running away.
  As was common on early ‘railway’ systems, the wagons could be privately owned by the hauliers themselves (known locally as halers) who paid the company a toll to use the tramroad.  The last haler to work the tramroad, John Procter, walked the 10-mile return journey twice a day for 32 years.  It has been estimated  that he walked or rode nearly 200,000 miles (300,000 km) during his career on the tramroad, and needed his clogs resoling once per week.
caption: The 1960s replica bridge across the Ribble
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