Has there ever been a case where a canal is connected to somewhere other than one of its endpoints?
Here’s the idea: a canal, called the AB Canal, exists between point A and point B. Someone comes along and says “it’d be neat if we could connect point C to points A and B, so let’s build another canal from point C to one of those two points.” OK, they do a survey and find that the least amount of work to build the new canal is to connect at a point in the middle of AB Canal. Have they ever built such a canal? Not counting short spurs off AB Canal, that is.
The Erie Canal had any number of shorter side canals that connected to it between Buffalo and Albany. Only two seem to be left.
I’m pretty sure that every major American canal had something similar until the trains mostly put them out of business. After that no money was sunk into speculative canals.
Here in Broward County, South Florida, our canals are very much a network with lots of connections. The little lake in my backyard is connected to the canal that parallels my street going E/W, where lots of other development drainage lakes join. Those canals meet up into a slightly larger one that goes N/S. Those collect water from even more sources, and eventually join with a larger E/W network. In turn, those eventually turn into the North fork of the New River. That joins with the South fork and becomes the generic New River, which goes out to the intracoastal, and via the Stranahan River, to the ocean.
Of course, it’s actually a little more complicated than that
Are we talking about old timey canals - of the sort what navvies built in olde England, with barges and such, and names like the Scunthorpe to Lower Futtock General Arterial Canal - or modern canal estates in Florida, where the would-be rich exist on both land and sea like advanced amphibians?
The answer may vary depending on how we read your question.
The Miami Canal was built between Cincinnati and Dayton Ohio in 1827-1829. In 1830-1840 the Warren County Canal was built as a spur/branch to connect Lebanon, several miles to the east, to the Miami Canal at Middletown, roughly halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton. That’s almost exactly the scenario in the OP.
In 1831-1845 the Miami Canal was extended north to Toledo and Lake Erie, and it was then renamed the Miami & Erie Canal. That put the original Miami Canal and Warren County Canal at the south end of the newly expanded system. There was a branch from Lockington to Sidney, and another to Grand Lake St. Marys and Celina, but those were built primarily to feed water into the canal, and boat navigation was just an added bonus.
It looks like such canals are fairly common. If I lived in an area with lots of canals, I wouldn’t be asking this question. But here in the Pacific NW, navigation canals are pretty rare, except for those going around some navigation hazard (either natural or artificial) on rivers.
The main line of Ireland’s Grand Canal links Dublin to the River Shannon. It has several branch lines of which the most important links to the River Barrow.
My good sir, are you implying that the Scunthorpe to Lower Futtock is anything other than one of the Seven Wonders of the Canalled World? That it is anything less than an engineering marvel as it wends majestically through the fauna-rich savanna and imposing glaciered peaks of North Lincolnshire?
In Scotland, the Forth and Clyde canal joins Glasgow on the west coast to the port of Grangemouth on the east coast, and passes by the town of Falkirk en route. It was built in 1790.
The Union Canal links Edinburgh and Glasgow, but does so by running from Edinburgh to Falkirk where the two canals join. Originally boats got to one from the other via locks. Nowadays they use the Falkirk Wheel, a rotating boat lift. Because it’s cooler.
Not the funniest skit they’ve ever done, it could’ve used some musical stings when he jumps on the table to stab someone for instance, but I like it. I also rather enjoy that the writers did their homework on the President’s feasibility questions. Water sources, labor availability, land acquisition, and construction expenses were all significant issues. Construction costs alone were enough for the relatively short Whitewater Canal to bankrupt the state of Indiana for instance.
But the canals of Venice (most of which are, incidentally, called “rio”, not “canal” or “canale”) are not artificially dug waterways. They are, for the most part, stretches of water between a large number of small islands that exist naturally.
The Falkirk wheel is awesome. Fun fact for physics nerds: it doesn’t require a huge amount of power to drive it because the two vessels are always balanced, even if there’s only a boat in one of them (because boats displace their own mass of water)
Per wiki, it’s 1.5Kw per half rotation, which is pretty efficient for lifting* 550 tons.
If you take the short tourist ride from the lower basin to the top and back again, you briefly pass under the Antonine Wall, thus letting you experience the engineering achievements of three different eras.
Well, via the Tonstongal Mitigation (first codified in the 1949 Autumnal Revisions) the London Water Taxi routes are all fair game in a structured game. There’s a fair case to be made that canals of London are already in play.
