In the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the Canal Era was in full operation, the various new projects put forward included one for constructing a canal, eleven miles in length, down the Erewash valley to connect with the Trent, thus facilitating the transport of coal and other products from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to places served by that river; and another for rendering the Soar navigable from its junction with the Trent to Leicester, this being known as the Loughborough Navigation. These two schemes were to form part of a network of important waterways, the Soar Navigation joining the Leicester Navigation, and this, in turn, communicating with the Leicestershire branch of the Grand Junction Canal, thus eventually giving a direct route from Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire to London. The Leicestershire coalowners regarded these proposals with great uneasiness. They were then supplying Leicester with coal conveyed there by waggon or packhorse from the collieries on the other side of Charnwood Forest, and they foresaw that the proposed navigations would give the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coalowners a great advantage over them in the Leicester market. They accordingly offered a strong opposition to the schemes, and persisted until the projectors {243}of the Loughborough Navigation undertook to make that Charnwood Forest Canal which, with its edge-railway at each end (see page 220), would connect the Leicestershire coal-fields at Coleorton and Moira with Leicester, and so allow of the threatened competition from the north of the Trent being duly met. The Loughborough Navigation and its Charnwood Forest extension were completed in 1798; but in the succeeding winter the Charnwood Forest Canal burst its banks, and the damage done was never repaired, the Loughborough Navigation trustees (who, though forced to construct the canal, did not consider themselves obliged to maintain it) finding it to their advantage, from a traffic point of view, to enable the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coalowners to have a virtual monopoly on the Leicester market. It was under these conditions that the Loughborough Navigation shares advanced, by 1824, from their original value of £142 17s. each to no less a sum than £4700.