Fifteen or twenty barges were still using the river in the 1880s, although the upper reaches were no longer accessible. Arundel docks silted up between 1875 and 1896. In 1898, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, who by this time were the owners of the railway from Horsham to Littlehampton, drilled down into the tunnel where the main line and the branch to Midhurst crossed its course, and poured tons of chalk into the tunnel to stabilise it. A trade in chalk and lime extracted from Amberley chalk pits continued into the early twentieth century. Some ships were towed to Arundel by paddle tugs, and imports of salt, timber and coal for the gasworks continued. Arundel was visited by its last steamer in 1914, and the last sailing vessel to reach the port did so three years later. Passage of larger craft upstream was hindered by the construction of a swing bridge at Littlehampton in 1908, and prevented by a fixed railway bridge at Ford built in 1938. As freight traffic disappeared from the river, Edward Slaughter, who later became part of the company of Buller and Slaughter, was hiring pleasure craft by 1903, and the company was still doing so in the 1990s.