Robert
If you can get hold of Model Railway Journal No8,there is an excellent article by Dave Rowe on modelling canals.A later issue,which of course,I can't find,had another article by Allan Sibley,I believe.
Gas lighting would be standard.
Tipton,in your area,had an engine shed more or less on the towpath,it was really a brick shed and the Coal Tank allocated to shunt the various wharves in the area would'nt fit in!
All the best
Steve

 

As always everything depends on "exact" location and wider (immediate) environment.
What are you transhipping? Bulk minerals can be tipped - probably end door tip(s) - quite possibly fed via wagon turntable(s). Other goods would be man handled - "handballed" in the modern terminology. Yet other goods would use a crane - probably older "canal style".
These elements create different lighting needs.
!930s electric light is pretty unlikely - unless there is a very large traffic with a lot of action.
Arc lighting is possible - if the revenue/traffic justifies it.
Gas lighting gives a much better light than we would normally expect in our modern context. Incandescent gas mantles made a huge difference.
Oil lighting was not very good. Unlike gas much used a basic flame rather than a mantle. By the 1930s it would be mineral oil (paraffin) which was an improvement on vegetable oils. The big change-over came roughly between 1900 and 1910. Blackall of the GWR had finally managed to sort out long burning signal lamps using mineral oil by c1905. Subsequently the railways kept experimenting and improving the oil. While each railway company or signal maker developed their own lamps and outer cases there wasn't really much change in signal lights until electric lamps were fitted to a small proportion of signals. Electrically lit signals were more usually found in built-up areas and on the approaches to docks. While there were a few earlier electrically lit signals the increase came with World War 2 and ARP (Air Raid Precautions). Basically the electric signals could be turned off when the air raid alarms sounded. I always think that it must have been horrible for footplate crew to see all the signal lights go out. "Lamping" continued to be with paraffin well into the 1980s and probably beyond in more remote locations. The big change came about not with incandescent electric lamps but with LED light displays. Being reliable, efficient and low maintenance LED achieved a similar sudden mass change-over to that of the Edwardian change from vegetable to mineral oil.
Oil can be used in hurricane lamps (basic flame) or pressure (Tilley type) lamps (hand pumped pressure feeding a mantle).
Do not forget the option of candles! Also "flares" - cans. sometimes with a spout, with rags to act as wicks. Very basic - but the RAF used them throughout the 2nd World War as landing lights at more basic fields.

The big factor is availability.
For gas - you have to have a town supply - nearby - and pay for the pipes to link into the supply. And that's town gas from coal not "natural" gas that Sid converted everyone to.
The same goes for electric light - in the 1930s you had to not only have a local power station to hand - the wires to connect to it - but you had to be on the right system - voltage and technical stuff like that. A large location might, however, have its own generator, Railway supplies of non-traction electricity were pretty slow in progressing - there were simply too many other things to keep spending money on - and all the capital investment in equipment already in use. Some places never got electric light.
Paraffin was usually delivered and stored in metal drums. Some of these had conical tops to prevent stacking and consequent splitting.

So... As to a transhipment point... Unless traffic was large the lighting probably wouldn't be very good. Look for minimal. Check out whatever period pictures you can fine. Some of these will "prove me wrong" about how much light provided - these will be of busy places close to sources of supply.

When I see the modern lighting arrangements around track maintenance sites it makes me wonder how we ever coped in "my day" with hardly any lights - Bardic hand lamps and Tilley lamps for the most part. Before us - and in wartime black-out conditins - it's amazing how any work was ever achieved after dark.

PS Have you considered paved track? There were some good posts on here about that a year or three ago...

 

"Birmingham Canal Navigations - A cruising and walking Guide", published 1984 by the Birmingham branch of the Inland Waterways Association, contains a great deal of detail on the current and the past history of the "BCN" as it's usually called. Have a look at www.waterways.org.uk and find their bookshop to see if it's still being published. Further historic information can be found in such books as "The Canals of the West Midlands" by Charles Hadfield and published by David and Charles (sorry - don't have a copy so not certain of publishing date/ISBN).

A site that has aerial views of such interchanges is the website www.britainfromabove.org.uk.

A brief summary of the history of canals and railways in that area as I understand it. The canals came first, of course, and much of the Black Country's industry was built around the canal system. When railways came along, many of them couldn't reach the factories to bring in raw materials or take out finished products for various reasons of access and geography. So the railways built the interchange basins and used the canals to transport goods to and from the industries they couldn't otherwise reach. Much of the BCN came under the control of the London and Birmingham railway, later the LNWR. Other railways who built interchange basins were the GWR and the Midland Railway. By 1905 7.4M tons of goods were carried on the BCN, but only 1.4M tons went outside the BCN area. Despite the development of road vehicles, the BCN remained active on carrying goods between rail and industry into the 1950s.

Most of the 'internal' traffic on the BCN was carried in horse-drawn 'day' boats rather than the powered narrow-boats carrying the longer distance traffic. Late Edit: I've just found out that BR ran day boats until 1964!

Regarding lighting, the Black Country had plenty of supplies of gas (often from coal carried on the BCN) and was also an early user of electrical power as a result of the industrial needs of the area.

Hope this helps,
John Webb

 

Now a few years past, I had a couple of days walking around what I came to think of as 'Birmnigham's basement', largely on the network of canal towpaths. There were very obvious rail and canal interchanges in evidence, and I feel some of them must have had the wagons worked down to the canalside by rope haulage on capstans, because the gradients and curvatures would have prevented locomotive working?

+1 on the suggestion of the track set into paving. Stone setts dominated in the areas I looked around. Another interesting feature at basins and in wider canal sections were covered structures extending out over the canal, presumably to protect sensitive goods from rain damage.