Coal and transport

One of the most exciting recent developments with the Occupations project has been the completion of the navigable waterways dataset. This plus the railways GIS enables the complex geography of changing transport networks and their interactions with the wider economy to explored in great detail. The two maps below illustrate this point. The first map shows navigable waterways, open coalfields and townships with coal dealers in North East England c. 1817. It illustrates the strong relationship between navigable waterways and the marketing of coal. Most of the coal dealers were found in townships with access to navigable water presumably because of low transport costs. The only coal dealers not near navigable water were located actually within the coalfields, where coal was close to hand. Elsewhere the much greater cost of road transport appears to have been an active disincentive to coal dealers. The second map shows the distribution of coal dealers in the North East in 1881. The impact of the railways is clear. Coal dealers are now to be found across a much wider area due to the reduction in transport costs.