The Falkirk Wheel is the name by which is known to the only vessels transshipment revolving system in the world. It is a huge infrastructure that allows the connection of two river channels in Scotland with a gap between them from 35 meters. We are talking about the famous channels Forth & Clyde and Union Canal.
These channels were used very frequently in the days prior to the expansion of railway. With the arrival of the trains, the channels were relegated a little bit, but in the 90’s decade it started to revive the interest in their use for recreational purposes.
The two channels had been equipped with a communication with each other through dams around the year 1800, but this system could only be used in the downstream way. The local authorities thought it would be a good idea to recover the channels (quite degraded and also covered by the roads in some stretches), as well as provide them with a faster communication than the old system of dams, which could help to make the area more attractive for the tourism and even for residents. This great project was called “The Millennium Link”, of which the most important piece was the big transporting wheel, located in the vicinity of the town of Falkirk.
The project required a large outlay of money, more than 84 million pounds (about 120 million Euros), of which 32 had been raised through the lotteries. Only the main part of the project, the “Falkirk Wheel,” cost about 17 million.
To communicate the two channels they had to build a deviation from the highest of the canals, the Union Canal. Such a difference, after leveling down 2 dams, goes through a tunnel of 168 meters and a small concrete channel of 104 meters that flows directly into one of the transshipment gondolas of the Falkirk Wheel.
The wheel consists of a steel structure of about 35 meters of height, which rotates through a central axis, which is driven by hydraulic motors located in one of the mainstays of the shaft. The armor of the wheel houses 2 semicircular containers that are filled with water and have the capacity of 2 ships each (river boats of passengers). At the base of the wheel is located a dry container, which allows that the base does not come directly into contact with water.
Each container has a series of dams on the end of each, that allows the ships to enter and to depart at one end by the opposite when you get to the other level. These hermetic systems are designed to have a minimum loss of water for each transshipment. When the wheel is spinning, the mechanisms of each container keep the ships in a horizontal position, rotating as the wheel makes. The operation of the half turn of the wheel, which allows the exchange of the positions of the containers, lasts around 15 minutes.
The mechanism of control over the movement and rotation of the wheel consists of 8 hydraulic engines mounted circle around one of the ends of the axis of the wheel. The way to keep the horizontality of the containers consists of a set of gears and belts mounted so that the twisting motion of containers bound to turn the hub of the wheel, through the physical union that provides the gear.
This infrastructure, completed in 2002, is another of the many examples of how the man overcomes the difficulties of communication that often presents nature, in this case the gap of 2 waterways.
More information:
Photo gallery in Flickr
Wikipedia’s main article
http://www.falkirkwheel.info/
http://www.thefalkirkwheel.co.uk
When we talk about abandoned buildings we usually think in industrial useless one, old services buildings like jails, hospitals, stations, rural complexes,
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