What are the advantages of canals …

1. Canals were initially built to transport coal to cities. This was because the bulk and weight of coal made its transport by road much slower and more expensive than by barges on canals. The demand for coal, as industrial energy and for heating and lighting homes in cities, grew constantly.
The making of the first English canal, the Worsley Canal (1761) by James Brindley (1716-72), had no other purpose than to carry him from the coal deposits at Worsley (near Manchester) to that city; after the canal was completed the price of coal fell by half.
2. Canals were usually built by big landowners to increase the value of the mines, quarries or forests on their lands. The confluence of canals created marketing centres in new towns. The city of Birmingham, for example, owed its growth to its position at the heart of a canal system connecting London, the Bristol Channel, and the Mersey and Humber rivers.
From 1760 to 1790, twenty-five new canal building projects were begun. In the period known as the "canal-mania" from 1788 to 1796, there were smother 46 new projects and over the next 60 years more than 4,000 miles of canal were built.
3. The first steam locomotive, Stephenson's Rocket, appeared in 1814. Railways emerged as a new means of transportation that was available throughout the year, both cheap and fast, to carry passengers and goods. They combined two inventions, the iron track which replaced the wooden track in the 1760s) and haulage along it by a steam-engine.
4. The invention of the railways took the entire process of industrialisation to a second stage. In 1801, Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) had devised an engine called the "Puffing Devil" that pulled trucks around the mine where he worked in Cornwall. In 1814, the railway engineer George Stephenson (1781-1848) constructed a locomotive, called "The Blutcher", that could pull a weight of 30 tons up a hill at 4 mph.
The first railway line connected the cities of Stockton and Darlington in 1825, a distance of 9 miles that was completed in two hours at speed of upto 24 kph (15 mph), and the next railway line connected Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Within 20 years speed of 30 to 50 miles an hour were usual.