
February 24th – I passed the boat yard at Ogley Junction as dusk was falling. I note with some disdain that the dredgers and associated butties and tugs are still languishing here,12months to the day after the blue machine toppled over in Anglesey Basin, it remains abandoned with the other equipment – including a decent tug – brought in to do the job. Behind them, the white and yellow frame of a brand new, unused dredger called ‘Hamster’, left here at least four years ago by British Waterways and never used. Such machinery is extortionately expensive. Just who can afford to purchase it and then let it rust away, unused, to nothing?
Madness. And they wonder why the Canal & River Trust is struggling.