Tuesday 31 January 2017

Swedish Winter

I've spent January scanning old photographs - negatives and slides. Very nostalgic.
Patience has been frozen in before now - here she is in 2010 on the Old West river -
but we seem to have avoided ice and snow recently.
Long long ago I worked for a year in Sweden, in a steel town called Fagersta which is in Västmanland. An industrial town producing steel, it has a canal nearby called the Strömsholmskanal, linking Lake Mälaren  to Smedjebacken and created to transport the product of the iron foundries.
It was always worth a stroll, especially on bright winter days, and here are three photographs of one of the 26 locks, 6 of which are in Fagersta. The ice and snow gives it a certain excitement, I think.



It is 62 miles long, took 18 years to build, between 1772 and 1795, and is now used only by leisure craft. I gather the canal has been renovated since I was there in 1976. Sadly I don't think Patience will make it to Fagersta and the Strömsholmskanal.

As a footnote I note that Thomas Telford (engineer of 17 canals and many bridges, including Caledonian Canal and the Pontycysyllte Aqueduct), had a hand in the early stages (1810) of the Göta canal in south west Sweden. That is not connected to this earlier canal, however.

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