Back in the 1990s, any guide describing the canals and rivers of Yorkshire and the north eastern part of the network would make a point of emphasising how these large-scale waterways were still busy with freight barges loading several hundred tonnes each and helping to satisfy the nation's transport needs - unlike the small-scale canals of the Midlands and most of the rest of the system, where regular commercial freight had died out a quarter of a century earlier. Cargoes on the Trent, the Aire & Calder Navigation and the Sheffield & South Yorkshire Navigation included coal, stone, oil, gravel and sand. But one by one these traffics disappeared, not necessarily for reasons that were anything to do with the inadequacy of the transport system - deep coal mining was in terminal decline, while a major aggregates trade became surplus to requirements following mergers in the industry. And the same story had been repeated on other larger waterways such as the Severn and the Weaver.
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