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For many years, British Waterways has claimed to be a champion of water transport. So an opportunity to restart commercial water transport on London’s extensive waterway network should have been seen as a golden opportunity to put substance to this claim.
But British Waterways ducked the challenge; the London region office tried to ditch the project before it started, then did not give it the priority it deserved. Badly planned and poorly executed, the project limps on, but its performance shows only too clearly the real lack of commitment that BW has towards commercial water transport.
In 2001, a proposal to transport sand and gravel 5 miles by barge on the Grand Union canal from gravel pits at Denham near Uxbridge to Hanson’s canalside works at West Drayton was put to British Waterways.
 British Waterways London Region was against the proposal and it took a directive from BW head office to get the project started. A 7-year contract was signed between BW London Region, Harleyford Aggregates and Hanson Aggregates to ship 60,000 tonnes of sand and gravel per year. This would have taken 21,000 heavy goods vehicle movements off the roads over the life of the contract, reducing traffic congestion and improving the West London environment.
BW did not put the contract for the barge transport out to public tender, but awarded it directly to their term contractor who had limited previous experience of barge transport.
 Little thought went into the design of the purpose-built barges and a litany of problems became apparent as soon as they had gone into service.
Firstly, it was found that when the barges were unladen, the propellers were not properly in the water. To get them down into the water, the back of the barges had to be ballasted with canal water. But no ballast tanks were fitted, so the ballast water had to be pumped into the only space available, the aft–most of the three aggregate hoppers.
The second problem became apparent as soon as the ballast water had been pumped aboard to make the propellers work properly; the stern was pushed down as intended, but in doing so, the bows went up in the air to such an extent that the helmsman couldn’t see over it for the journey to Denham.
 To solve this, the barge had to be ballasted at the other end as well, but again, there were no water ballast tanks in the hull, so water had to be pumped into the only other space available, the foremost aggregate hopper. At last, the barge was level and the propeller was in the water.
But then the next problem became apparent. The ballast water had to pumped out of the hoppers before the aggregate cargo could be loaded at Denham and this took up valuable time, more of which was lost when the water had to be pumped back in for the return journey.
The farce didn’t end there. BW’s own past experience was that conventional propellers tended to jam when weed, ropes, or indeed, anything floating in the canal passed through them. They had found, long before the Hanson-Harleyford project, that there were other propellers available that would solve this problem. Nonetheless, BW stood by whilst conventional propellers were fitted to the barges. The inevitable result was that yet more time was lost as the barge crews spent hours disentangling the rubbish that the propellers picked up. Sometimes, the barge had to be pushed by a tug so as to keep up the semblance of a regular service.
But farce was to move on to fiasco. BW clearly did not bother to consult their own naval architects, for the propellers were mounted so close behind the barge’s hull that they could not get a sufficient inflow of water to work properly. The result was that the barges couldn’t achieve a satisfactory speed, whether loaded or unloaded.
The time delays that these various problems introduced meant that the barges could not achieve the required two delivery trips per day, and that meant the required tonnage could not be carried.
BW are reticent about providing statistics on the project, but a Freedom of Information Act application revealed in 2006 that two years after the contract had started the barges had carried less than half the contracted quantity.
British Waterways refer to the Hanson-Harleyford barge transport as a success story. In reality, an almost complete lack of care in planning and executing the project produced a transport system that has not delivered on its potential.
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