The Waterbus Returns

Summers on the Lancaster Canal are enlivened by the regular passage of "Kingfisher", which operates what is described as a "water bus" service between Barton Grange (north of Preston) and the northern terminus at Tewitfield, although if normal buses were as slow and infrequent as this they would have died out long ago.
What the Kingfisher actually does is to provide a series of excursions along the canal, starting at Barton on Mondays and making its way in stages to Tewitfield and back over the course of a week, with a few short rtrips (such as Lancaster to the Lune Aqueduct) thown in.
The service proper doesn't begin until July but Kingfisher was seen here in Lancaster last week providing the "canal" part of an inclusive road-and-canal day tour of north Lancashire in conjunction with a coach operator, and judging by the passenger loading on the coach parked nearby very popular it was too.


The Lancaster Canal was one of a small number that provided passenger services in the days before the railways, although they were considerably faster than today's boats if this information from the Lancaster Canal Trust's website is anything to go by.